Back to the Bay turns 9!
Happy Birthday Back to the Bay! On 14th January 2004 this site opened its doors for the very first time. Nine years later we’sre still going strong, with 19,000+ forum members, a mammoth archive of summaries from almost every single episode, in-depth biographies of 600+ Home and Away characters past and present, and information and pictures on many of the show’ss best loved locations.
All of this couldn’st have been done without the hard work of our dedicated team of administrators, forum moderators and contributors. So a huge thank you to our current team – Dan, Ryan, Karen, Barbara, Dean, Ed, Foxy, Jen, John, Mez, Mark, Quiet Achiever, Red Ranger and myself – as well everyone else who has helped out over the years; there are just too many of you to mention.
It’ss amazing to think that Back to the Bay has been around for 9 years, but our history can be traced even further back….
A quick history of Back to the Bay…
We started off as two seperate sites, Jeremai Smith’ss The Home and Away Source and Chris Jenkins’s AussieSoap.com. The exact date these sites launched is unknown, but we’sre guessing some time around mid to late 2003. Those sites eventually merged to form an even bigger AussieSoap.com, which eventually split in two, creating a seperate Neighbours site (Neighbours.me.uk – now long gone) and our very own Back to the Bay.
Yet in a sense, we’sve been around even longer. In June 2004, we merged with long-running website Home and Away.org, making Back to the Bay even bigger. Home and Away.org launched in 1998, making some of this site’ss content 15 years old!
In fact, if you want to look back even further, Jeremai’ss first Home and Away e-newsletter – Summer Bay News – launched in 1997. So the whole long process to bring us to where we are today started a massive 16 years ago! You can explore some of the old newsletters at our Summer Bay News archive.
So yes, Happy 9th Birthday to Back to the Bay! Here’ss to 9 more great years. If you want to wish us a happy birthday or read messages from our other members, discuss this on our forum.
Home and Away’ss Own Anniversary
Home and Away celebrates a birthday of its own this week. It is celebrating its 25th anniversary on 17th January – a whole quarter of a century after the show made its debut on Australian screens, on 17th January 1988. Read our summary of the show’ss pilot episode.