Spencer's Web Page

Spencer Bruce Dolling
May 12, 1995 - May 21, 2008

Journal

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 1:53 AM CDT

A Bifurcation

Well I’m going to leave Spencer’s website as it is for a while. At the moment there is a happy picture of Spencer at a cenote in Mexico. It’s a highly significant photo. Soon I will have important news from the region regarding Spencer, but I can’t say what just yet. We’ll call it Spencer’s Surprise.

Speaking of surprises Tracey went see Mackenzie dance a few weeks ago. Mackenzie was Spencer’s first friend. She did a major solo dedicated to Spencer. Tracey was blown away and cried through the whole thing so she is waiting for the video so she can actually see the dance.

Thursday is the last day of school. Pitt River Middle School wants to have an award honouring Spencer and asked us to come up with criteria and be present for the ceremony. Given that Spencer missed about 2/3 of sixth grade and nearly all of seventh, and because he had a wicked sense of humour, we’ve decided to make the award for attendance. Or something else. I don’t really want to give away the fun.

So we will leave the Mayan photo on Spencer’s website until the official news.

http://www.caringbridge.org/canada/spencer/


Meanwhile I need to introduce the new website. It’s been around for a little while with parallel content. It’s going to do have a lot of features that the old website doesn’t have. We will be able to send updates via email from single sideband radio from 100 miles offshore. Well be able to press a little button on the Spot messenger and our postion will be shown on a live map with a link to the latest blog. There’s room for photo galleries and video links for our voyages. All of this technology comes at a price, but we have a generous sponsor who I’ll introduce at a later time, after I let Stewart know that he is sponsoring our sailing blog.

http://www.sailblogs.com/member/blackdragon/

Foster just turned eleven. He had 15 of his closest buddies over for a party and sleepover. They were a bit noisy, but seem to have a lot of fun tearing around the neighbourhood with flashlights on a scavanger hunt. Not one of them made me coffee on Father’s Day morning! But I have to say I like the playlist they put together. It was AC/DC, AFI, Beatles, Bowie, Police, Queen, Zepplin, Stones, Floyd, G&R, & Chickenfoot - 19 songs in all. I’m not sure if ten and eleven year olds really like this music, or if that was just the best they could do with the library on my iPod. Check out the sailblogs website to see the coolest new land transportation for Foster.

Good news. We have solar and single sideband. 400 Watts in on the solar. 150 Watts out on the radio. Our liferaft is on order. And a nice man from the beacon registry in Ottawa called to chat about my EPIRB filing today. The 100 cone drogue is done including bridle! The bimini is complete. The speed/depth/temperature triducer is working on the NEMA 2000 network. Haulout is Saturday. We’ll be painting the bottom and putting in a new seacock for the watermaker. The new mainsail is nearly done. I just need to sew in the boltrope and have some rings pressed in. All of this probably utterly foreign language gobbledy gook, but stick with us and it will all make sense eventually.

August 1st is departure day. Big party at Vicki and John’s and we set sail from there.

We’ve rented the house to a nice family from South Africa. We told Thunderbird that they can let our slip go. So at this point, we have pretty much reached the point of no return. God help us if we turn the corner at Cape Flattery and decide we don’t like really Pacific swells!

Any way. Not many of these emails will follow. Updates will be updating exclusively on the sailblogs website. You can click on the little orange RSS button and your computer will tell you when there is a new entry.

Cheers,

Steve

Hospital Information:

Children's Hospital

Vancouver BC

Links:

E-mail Author: dolling@shaw.ca

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