ATTENTION EARTH PEOPLE! As I write this I am approaching Bermuda, blasting along but 70 miles out on what seems a perpetual close reach, due for a landing sometime in the wee hours tomorrow, of which more later. What I really want to spout off about right now are inflatable tenders. I was thinking about this as we were preparing to leave Puerto Rico, while regarding our neighbors on a 45-foot Bristol next door, who were about to depart for Annapolis. They had just stowed their RIB tender for the passage, and it took up all of their foredeck. I mean ALL of it! On Lunacy, meanwhile... well, you see that photo up there?

Here's the full readout on what happened and the consequences:

At a hearing 30/05/2011 at Southampton Magistrates the Officer of the Watch of a fishing vessel pleaded guilty to one safety charge brought under Section 58 of the Merchant Shipping Act 1995. He was fined £1,700 plus costs of £6,435.

On the 20th August 2010 the Andrea had finished fishing and was returning to port in the Netherlands. The skipper and rest of the crew were below leaving Jan Baarssen alone on the bridge in sole charge of the vessel. The Andrea is a 36.5 metre beam trawler registered in the UK but is based in the Netherlands.

The Alexander von Humboldt was returning to Germany after a training voyage with a crew of fifty nine (59) consisting of thirty three (33) trainees and twenty six (26) full time crew. She is a large three masted sail training vessel registered in Germany. 

The visibility on the day was good (10 Km +), wind was southerly force 5-6 with weather being grey and overcast. 

During the afternoon of the 20th August 2011 the Alexander von Humboldt detected the Andrea on a steady bearing on its port side. The Andrea was not fishing and was the give way vessel. The

Written by Ben Ellison on Mar 20, 2013 for Panbo, The Marine Electronics Hub

One of the more common questions I get about life aboard is, "How do you make it all fit?"  That's easy.  Step one: prioritize.  We follow a simple space allocation formula on Papillon.  I'll draw you a pie chart.

QUIZ ANY CURMUDGEON these days on the subject of proper wayfinding and you'll soon find yourself reefed down in a gale of conventional wisdom about the importance of paper charts, compass bearings, dead reckoning, sextants, and the like. But what curmudgeons tend to forget, as they rail on about how modern nav tools are corrupting us, is that many of their sacred cows are also just tools. They are more primitive, simpler, hence more reliable in one sense (if not more accurate), but still they are not the organic root of navigation.

Reduced to its purest form, human navigation (as opposed to more advanced forms used by migratory cetaceans, birds, and fish) is simply a matter of being able to look at something from a distance and say what it is. In a state of nature we can travel knowingly only as far as we can see.

I feel like I'm decidedly in the minority when it comes to the modern ocean sailing game. My boat is from 1966, my GPS a handheld unit from 1993, we've got paper charts onboard and no electrics whatsoever besides the LED lighting. Hank-on headsails (we carry five of them), tiller steering and a 35-gallon water tank. The engine only works to charge the batteries and get us in and out of the dock.

SAY WHAT??? Has my esteemed SAILfeed colleague, the mysterious Mariner, been spending too much time sniffing go-juice fumes? I eagerly dove into his post yesterday, in which he hailed and linked to "the first detailed journalistic account" of the loss of HMS Bounty, but was sorely disappointed by what I found. The account in question, currently bouncing around the Internet in various (often unattributed) iterations, was originally published by Spiegel Online and is barely coherent in places and doesn't even pretend to address some of the biggest questions raised by the tragedy.

This new anchoring system, developed by Peter Weber in Slovenia, was formally introduced at the METS (Marine Equipment Trade Show) extravaganza in Amsterdam this month, where it was nominated for a DAME Award, and was also on our shortlist at SAIL when we put our heads together this week to pick winners for the 2013 Freeman K. Pittman Innovation Awards. It is a fascinating concept. The drawing up top gives a clear idea of the basic principle: a pair of anchors that can be deployed together on a single chain rode, designed so that one can nest inside the other when stowed.