Around-n-Over - Dispatches

Black thick padding was retired a while ago; white thin padding works better on this ocean.

All healed...
October 24, 2010 (Day 104) 12.5887S,51.6872E
In my September 29 dispatch, I complained of salt rashes which were really bothering me. I later removed my softer thick foam padding which had a neoprene cover, then replaced it with a thinner hard closed cell foam pad.

The former had a tendency to concentrate the salt. Except for the last three weeks or so, the SW swells made this ocean a very obnoxious splashy one. Each splash of a wave would soak the thick padding, then that would dry. Repeatedly splashed especially while exposed overnight, the soft padding had become a salt pan over time on which I would sit every morning and let my skin cook.

The thinner pad does not soak water. It has a shiny sealed finish on its surface which is easy to wipe or rinse with fresh water. I use an often rinsed cloth layer over it, rinse salt water off my skin as necessary and let my bottom be air dried. The seas are more orderly lately without much splashing. So by now, all of my rashes have receded and I am more comfortable.

I may have also solved the modem problem. My modem connection by satellite phone kept dropping, was misbehaving and giving me false clues. I went through a time wasting process of elimination including swapping hardware and restoring software from backup. Days of frustration followed, with twenty dialups to get maybe one connection, always leading me to think something had changed on the network side. I had verified every component on my end, so I thought.

Then two days ago, I noticed a tiny spot of bluish green corrosion on one of the contact leads at the base of the Iridium handset. Perhaps it was from salt water or even from sweat from my hand. These leads connect the satellite phone to its cradle or its serial adapter for data transmission. The corrosion spanned the gap between two leads; it may have been literally shorting those two contact surfaces. I scraped off the corrosion and since then, my email and dispatch capabilities are back to normal - yey!

Erden.
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