Day 14: Hanging on by a Thread

Day 14: Hanging on by a Thread.
At the time of writing, my ability to communicate with dry land hangs by a thread. Despite having three satphones, three laptops and one transponder, currently my only way to communicate is by voicemails from my satphone.
The upshot of all this for you, dear reader, is that my blogs might be lacking their usual colour. I won’t be able to post photos, and I won’t be able to respond to your comments (which I would normally receive via email) But blogs should still be posted daily and my position will be updated twice daily, and hopefully once we’ve sorted out a couple of glitches I should be able to tweet.
Mum and I have been busy putting contingency plans in place. When all else fails thank heavens my good old mom is there for me. Unless we manage to get some solutions (but at the moment I am not optimistic) all blogs from now on will be dictated by me and transcribed by my mother. Laborious, but provided I get a strong enough signal so that Mum can understand my dictation it should work.
Important though blogging and tweeting are to my, my primary concern is safety. Unfortunately my tech problems are compounded by the failure of my location transponder which normally should ping by position lat and long totally independent of my satphone but stopped working a few days into this voyage and the problem seems permanent
So unless . . . . reports my position, nobody knows where I am . From the safety point of view this is not good. My weatherman needs to know my position too. Weather systems can be very localized even on the ocean.
Our provisional plan is that I will let my mother know my position twice a day: once when I dictate my blog, and once by SMS from my satphone.
Apologies for all this. A couple of things could have been remedied by more extensive testing before I left land, but the main issues arose after the start of the voyage, so nothing more could have been done.
It is all very inconvenient. I am less than happy for the – less than – optimal service, but when you think about it, it is pretty amazing that I am able to communicate from the middle of the ocean at all. So I hope you will be patient with these minor shortcomings and will continue to follow along with my adventure. We’ll just have to look forward to a major photo-fest once I get back to dry land, wherever and whenever that may be!
Other Stuff: Amidst all this kit becoming dead or defunct I am happy to report that Alf is fine and lives and proved the point by running over my hand earlier today.
Today was a fine day for rowing. After a wet start the clouds lightened and parted, the wind rose and it turned into a bright and breezy, fine and beautiful day and I made excellent progress in more or less the right direction, around 53 miles in the last 24 hours.
OK this is already more than enough for poor old Mum to transcribe. So I will sign off and leave it to Mum to add updates on our Go Roz Go Contest and Ecoheroes.
Position report: 1 38.009S 164 30.625E

Rita: Apologies for a row of little dots in one part of the blog – the voicemail signal broke up a bit and I could not make out the few words. This may well happen in future transcriptions as well.
This present situation is reminiscent of Roz’s Atlantic crossing. On Day 78 her satphone stopped working, and for the remainder of the voyage there was no communication with her at all. In her e-book: Blogs from the Blue, available through Roz’s Ebay Store, you can read how I had to cope with that situation.
Go Roz Go: Nova has been hard at work ironing out a few glitches with PayPal, but all is well now and ready to receive your guesses about when and where Roz might reach land.
Roz is very keen that friends should sign up to be Ecoheroes – http://ecoheroes.me
To be an Ecohero we promise to do “green” deeds each day. There is still a bit more to be done before this launches in its full glory – but there is no need to delay signing up.