Our Biggest Post Ever & Other Exciting News

So, first, the BIG news. After two years in a row of winning the Rotary Club of Wesley Chapel Adult Spelling Bee, yours truly reverted to his usual choking-in-spelling-bees ways, as the Neighborhood News Horrific Spellers finished in a tie for about 10th (of 23 teams) on Apr. 8, when “Kount Drakyoula” himself (see photo below, courtesy of OurTownFla.com, of one of the 20+ words we spelled correctly) misspelled the word “onomatopoeia” (I spelled it “onamotopoeia”… missed it by thatmuch). The two sad facts were that:

1) I believe our team was the only one to spell all 20 words correctly during the first two rounds of this year’s bee (held again at the Tampa Bay Golf & Country Club in San Antonio), when you can “bribe” your way back into the competition by paying $10 (we got to trade in our prepurchased bribes, which you can not use in the third round) for non-winning raffle tickets) — thanks again to another couple of great assists on medical words from my teammate, event co-chair Karina Azank, M.D..

2) I actually practiced that word only a couple of hours before the event and really thought I remembered it correctly. Old age?

It was still a great event to benefit the Pasco Education Foundation and the Rotary Club of Wesley Chapel Noon Fund (our club’s nonprofit foundation)…and hey, even the Golden State Warriors didn’t win them all this year.

And The ‘Magic’ Continues…

The photo was the happiest I was the day after the Spelling Bee, as the organizers of the 13th annual Sharkbite Challenge off Honeymoon Island in Dunedin called off the “official” race on Apr. 9 due to high winds (20-30 knots) and seas (3-4-ft. waves).

I did return to the Dunedin Causeway the next day, when the winds were down to 10-15 knots and the waves down to 2-3-ft., but I never quite finished the 4-mile race, at least not without swimming the kayak about a half-mile to shore after a wave knocked me out of it. It’s a long, crazy story (to which my fellow WC Rotarians can attest), but I’m still planning to do another race soon…just not without the proper kayak. Most of the 100+ competitors at the race I didn’t finish were in sleek 14-18-ft. composite racing kayaks that look like Olympic sculls. I was in a borrowed, 9-ft. plastic kayak that I now realize I was probably lucky to be able to swim to shore.

Lucky? Heck yeah. After all, no one else at the race did a marine biathlon that day, right?

OK, Here’s Some Actual News…

Until Apr. 7, the single “biggest” post we ever had on our “Neighborhood News” Facebook page was viewed about 28,000 times, with about 4,000 click-throughs to read the actual story on our website.

But, Apr. 7 was the day we posted the map on page 12 of this issue, which shows what’s both officially coming and rumored to be coming to the area around the Tampa Premium Outlets mall off S.R. 56.

The map was on page 1 of our Wesley Chapel issue the following day, but it already had created a record stir (for us, of course) when it received 63,000+ views on our Facebook page — more than doubling our previous best — and an even more staggering 51,000+ click-throughs to our NTNeighborhoodNews.com website! That’s more than 12 times the number of people who had clicked through to our site in any single day!

The second map — of the area near our office on S.R. 54 near I-75 and Bruce B. Downs Blvd. in Wesley Chapel — was no slouch, either, although it “only” garnered 18,200+ page views and a few thousand click-throughs to our site.

What’s WCNT-TV?…

It’s the fun and informative web-based “TV” magazine show all about Wesley Chapel (WC) and New Tampa (NT) that’s launching soon. I can’t tell you much about it just yet, other than it’s a joint venture between yours truly and Full Throttle Intermedia (FTIntermedia.com), in association with the Greater Wesley Chapel Chamber of Commerce.