Local Adventure-Travel Show leads on Kickstarter

Heading into this long weekend, we here at Hit and Run History thought we’d challenge our fans — especially those on the Cape — to help raise our profile on the online fundraising site Kickstarter.

After all, if you are working to follow the first American voyage ’round the world and you’re looking to head down to Cape Horn, you don’t turn down the offer of a South American cruise lineCruceros Australis to take you through the Straits of Magellan.  So we’re just looking to raise the funds to bring our crew down there.

It’s no accident that we received the first-ever Social Media Outreach Grant from the Massachusetts Humanities Foundation recently.  On Thursday, we went to work using Facebook and Twitter especially.

Now, thanks to the help of dozens and dozens of our fans, in just 48 hours we have doubled the amount of money pledged and tripled our number of backers.

And having just checked on Kickstarter’s “Boston Projects” page, you can see Hit and Run History is THE TOP FILM PROJECT IN BOSTON.

That’s right — your scrappy band of New Englanders is taking on the world and making a name for itself.

But like Captain John Kendrick and the rest of the crew of the Columbia Expedition, we still have a long way ahead of us.  So please, take a moment and pledge a buck.  Yes, just $1.00.

Help us keep the number of backers growing and push us to the top film project in the country.  That will take grassroots support.  We’ve proven this works, and we’re looking to get the attention of the larger underwriters.

Give us a look…

On Tuesday night, I was at the New York Yacht Club when the Argentine Consul made sure to say goodbye to me on his way out.

That’s a hell of a revelation. How did a simple clammdigger from the Common Flat off Monomoy Island get here?

It was a 5:15 AM wakeup, a two-hour drive to Providence, the 4-hour express bus ride into Manhattan, and a short walk over. That’s literally how I did it. And it would be followed by the 10 PM ride out of the city, getting home at 3 AM.

That’s the sort of determination it has taken over the past three years to get Hit and Run History noticed. To get us to in the door at WGBH. To get over 1,500 fans worldwide. To get me invited to a reception for Cruceros Australis, the South American cruise line that is offering to take us from Patagonia to Cape Horn.

And to end up talking with the Argentine Consul for New York about what the American sailors of the Columbia found in the Falklands. “Malvinas” he corrected me, most diplomatically. But he wanted to know more about these tough Yankee sailors like John Kendrick who attempted the near suicidal rounding of Cape Horn.

It’s our third chapter of our story. In following the Columbia Expedition around the world, every other location will be relatively easy: Vancouver, Hawaii, China and Japan. But just try to find a flight to the Falklands. Once a week, and pretty expensive at that.

Then throw in the End of the Earth – Cape Horn – and Robinson Crusoe Island off Chile. Now multiply by the number of crew we need to do this. 3, 4 or best at 5.

We can do this. We can get to all these places. We can get on the ship before season ends and the offer is gone.

We can show the world, and the networks, what a scrappy band from the coast of New England can do. Just like our story.

But we’ve just got to get your help. And we need it right away.

As a fan, you’ve probably noticed our posts about our Kickstarter campaign. For travel and production, we only need $19,500. That’s peanuts compared to most hour-long episodes of a travel, history or reality show.

But my experience as a commercial fisherman has taught me that you can make up for a lot with hard work, tenacity and creativity. And the tides wait for no one. Get out, get what you need, and move on.

Now we have a chance to show the angel investors and talent scouts who pay attention to Kickstarter that we have real support. Sure, it would be great if every one of our fans went to our page and pledged $25 (which also gets you a digital download of the film when complete).

If that happened we’d surpass our goal easily. Even $10 by every fan would put us within striking distance.

But instead, I am writing to ask you today to go to our site and pledge $1. Just one dollar.

It’ll get us nowhere near our goal. But if we get 500 pledges over this weekend – from just one out of every three of our FB fans — we will zoom up into the list of most popular projects on Kickstarter.

And then the right people will notice.

So please, go to http://kck.st/hbmoKk, click on “Back this project” and pledge a buck.

If you get the chance, please, forward this to your friends ask them to do the same.

I have been very blessed to have so many talented and hardworking people to work with on Hit and Run History. We’ll be stopped dead in our tracks if we can’t tell this part of the story – the most dramatic and challenging chapter.

Asking for this doesn’t come easy. We’d rather just share our stories with you. All we’re asking for here is the equivalent of a cold drink on this long, tough road. You’d do that, right?

Many thanks,

Andy Buckley