Editing Openai/695e9cb7-4e38-800d-8b46-618e2443544d (section)

==== About “Don Spencer” (captain) — what I can and can’t confirm right now ====

With what I’ve pulled so far, I cannot yet verify a reliable public record tying a specific Don Spencer to that specific visiting ship in 1987. (That doesn’t mean he wasn’t the captain — it just means it isn’t showing up cleanly in indexed web sources.)

===== The fastest way to lock this down (high success rate) =====

Because we have:
* exact place: Sackett’s Harbor
* exact month/year: July 1987
* venue: Grunert’s Marina
* ship name: Rattlesnake

…the best sources are usually:
# Local newspapers (Watertown / Jefferson County / North Country) around June–Aug 1987
# Sackets Harbor historical site archives / event flyers
# Marina/community bulletin records if any survive
# Crewed vessel registration / owner references (if the ship toured, it often left a paper trail)

One complication: the NYS Historic Newspapers page that clearly contains that “David May of Toronto” line is blocking automated access (403) when opened directly, so I can only cite the snippet result I can see via search. nyshistoricnewspapers.org<ref>{{cite web|title=nyshistoricnewspapers.org|url=https://www.nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=jou19870602-01.1.7|publisher=nyshistoricnewspapers.org|access-date=2026-01-07}}</ref>
If you personally open that page in a browser (or from a library network), it may show the full article, which could include captain/crew details.