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Chas Stamm was the only webmaster until I joined the HRFA in 1998.

I just bought my Osprey that year and wanted to fish the Hudson so I looked up sources for fishing on the river. The HRFA's old site came up and I joined. Chas and I got to emailing back and forth and he asked if I would help out with the web page. I had a few of my students develop general layout of the current site as one of their projects in my course.

The page was laid out in frames to allow multiple authors to contribute to the site. The left side index frame tied together pages on the right from Chas Stamm, Gil Hawkins and myself. The right side frame simply displayed all the different pages any one of us wrote when you clicked on a link in the index. Because of my professional relationship with Net @ccess corporation they contributed space and bandwidth. Actually the company is owned and run by former students of my wife and I. They made it possible for us to register domain names and basically establish a home for the HRFANJ.ORG site. They continue to do this for us to this day free of charge. (When I retire and no longer have a professional relationship with them I don't know what we will do ...) I continue to develop animations, discussion pages, derby sign up pages and other specially written software for the HRFA pages that I use as demonstrations in my classes. We have developed a fairly sophisticated web site for the HRFA at basically no cost by utilizing the volunteered resources from multiple people and a few friendly business entities.

Chas and I both now share the title of webmaster. We have currently divided almost all of the web site between us. When you go to the HRFA site you will link to pages from Net Access or from Chas' web site in Florida or to the file server in my basement at home depending on what you would like to see. For example when you go to www.hrfanj.org you get a framework of two pages that are stored at the Net Access Site.

If you click on Access on the left you will get a page from Chas' site load on the right. Click on Report Your Catch on the left and you will load a page on the right that comes from a program that runs on the server in my basement. So as you can see the HRFA site can geographically originate anywhere from the Delaware Water Gap to Florida. We have even expanded beyond a single web site.

We registered www.hrfa.us when it became available and that link simply sends you to our main site. As we have become more sophisticated at registering anglers electronically for our derby we have set up another web site at www.stripedbassderby.com to keep tabs on our 2 major fishing derbies. We also have our own email and bulletin board system. This all adds up to one very extensive and sophisticated web presence. Probably one of the best of any fishing club anywhere.

Contributions are always welcome. We don't need money but could always use people to host and write web pages. They can be linked into the main web site very easily at any time because of the way we have set things up. If you have an idea of a web page you would like to write please let us know and we'll work with you to get started.

See you out there.

Fred

IN MEMORIAM

CTCT-20190326_164735_0

3/15/2020

The Hudson River Fishermen’s Association is saddened to announce the passing of one of our long-time members Fred Rung. Fred was a computer geek, fisherman and boater. He was known as a very kind person caring for both his ailing brother as well as his own wife Ann who preceded him last year.

For over 20 years, Fred Rung was a very dedicated HRFA member. He served as HRFA Vice President with Gil Hawkins (President 2014-16) and a Director. He was an educator and his experience and skills helped pioneer the HRFA website together with his mentor Charles Stamm (President 1996-98).

Among his many valuable contributions to our organization he created a unique, dedicated and sophisticated, web-based fishing contest program that registered, logged the catch and evaluated the results. Many such computer programs were first and one of a kind designed for the HRFA Contests such as the Striped Bass Derby and Surf Fishing tournaments.

For his dedication and valuable contributions, he received the highest HRFA honor, the Pete Barrett Award, in 2013.

We will miss his friendship, dedication and wisdom,

Capt. Aram Setian

HRFA 2020 President

Some words from Chas Stamm

Fred Rung and I worked on a number of projects together for the HRFA. Fred was always the “Gentle Giant” with a remarkable talent in computer skills. Back in 1997 the internet was in its infancy. You had to dial up a phone number to get on the internet. Fred found my early HRFA web site and contacted me expressing that he would like to use and develop our HRFA web site in his student classes.

That’s how we began.

We developed a number of HRFA projects together as we both learned about the internet. Aside from developing that award-winning web site, we worked on Fishing Derbies, contests, graphics, clothing and more.

One thing you may not know about Fred is that the two of us worked back and forth with graphics to develop the HRFA logo. Some old timers might remember that the old HRFA club logo which appeared on newsletters featured a “Tree” as its main point of focus. I offered a striped bass and showed it to Fred. He came back to me with a different striped bass. Then I modified the ship. Fred changed the trees on the left to a waterfall. I added the rope border in blue. Back and forth we went till we reached the design you see today on the web sites and newsletters. Fred even inserted a fish jumping out of the water fall on the right for the HRFA web site. He designed the HRFA Youth Angler Program Logo as well.

The first HRFA Striped Bass Derby could not have been done without Fred. I created the web pages, data entry of contestants and graphics along with coordinating the restaurant weigh in station. Carl Hartmann did most of the leg work on obtaining tackle shops to donate prizes and getting them to promote our event. Carl was a master on promoting events. Fred developed the software for the on-line registrations. This was the key to our success. Fred put all the pages together and made them work. Laptops were rare, and this was all just something we all hoped would work.

Again, there was no Wi-Fi back then. Fred and I were stringing wires and phone lines all around the Striped Bass Restaurant and the accompanying docks the night before the event to get things working. Because of Fred, the coordination of events for this Derby, and the help of HRFA members like Carl Hartmann, Glenn Blank, Carl Bruger, and the on-line registration of over 700 anglers, the event was a giant success for the HRFA. All made possible by the development of Fred’s software that we still use today.

Fred was a very special guy. He loved the HRFA and loved working on developing and improving our projects. He had the skills to do that.

I will miss him dearly.

Rest in peace my good friend.

Capt. Chas Stamm <’////><

HRFA Pres 1996-1998

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