The Garritys Go Parasailing

The great success of Okeedokee, the company that Dave Moses and I started in the heady dotcom bubble days is the Prince Edward Island Vacancy Service, a project that we continue to maintain, and take pride in because it works, and serves a useful purpose (finding a place to stay) for people in a pinch (when they can’t find a place to stay).

In the second year of the service, Bruce Garrity came on board as Tourism PEI’s in-kind contribution to the project, and through Bruce’s tenacity the number of tourism operators using the service grew considerably.

Anyone who’s worked with Bruce knows that he’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever come across — as ready to sit and chat about particle physics or tree pollen runoff as he is to get down to the business at hand.

Which is not to say that working hand in hand with Bruce didn’t have its challenges, mostly computer-related. Bruce, you see, was not raised in the digital age, and so the “okay, just record your voice, save it as a uLaw-format file, and upload to the server”-like tasks we presented him with were not second-nature. Or third or fourth-nature. As the main technical point-man for the project, I bore the brunt of dragging Bruce into the twenty-first century, and this involved a lot of early morning telephone calls.

And I’m not a morning person, as many can attest.

Suffice to say that there were many times that I used Bruce’s name in vain.

So it gives me particular pleasure to see Bruce falling off the end of a boat in a manner not unlike I might have imagined during the “is that a double click or a single click?” days.

Of course he’s not really falling off the end of a boat, he’s parasailing in New London as part of the pre-wedding shindig that his son Steven documented extensively.

My colleague from Yankee, Lisa Traffie, spoke very highly of the parasailing at The Pier — she went twice when she was here in July. We tried to organize an outing during my own family shindig a couple of weeks ago, but alas the wind was too high, and all parasailing was cancelled for the day we had set aside.

The Garritys make it look so much fun that I might have to take a day off work this fall before they shut down and see what I can see.