A LOT OF BLUEWATER SAILORS I know complain that they never catch fish while on passage. I once had this problem, too, but since perfecting my technique I've never once been skunked on a passage during which I have tried to catch fish. It's really not very hard and is a great way to vary your diet at sea.

Some hardcore "veggie-lantes" I know do like to argue that it is immoral to catch and eat fish. But the way I see it you have to look at things from the fish's perspective. A fish that is bigger than you normally will not hesitate to eat you if it is hungry. But it also probably won't kill you for sport and prominently display your remains in its home. Thus, rule number one in my guide to ethical fishing: never kill a fish for fun.

I WAS BUSY messing around with my own boat back in November, so failed to note the fantastic achievement of Paul Larsen, who finally, after 11 years of work, succeeded in smashing the world sailing speed record in Vestas Sailrocket 2. By now everyone knows the number: 65.45 knots. That was Sailrocket's average speed over a 500-meter course on Walvis Bay in Namibia on November 24 in 25 knots of wind. Almost 10 knots faster than the previous record (55.65 knots on a kiteboard), the biggest single leap forward in the history of speed sailing... and Larsen claims he is confident that Sailrocket, in her current configuration, can easily top 70 knots.

So how does this weird-looking vessel manage to go so fast? Everyone has seen pictures of it, but I don't think too many people understand much about how the boat actually works.

IT'S JUST his 15th lifeboat rescue... is how the Rolling Stones might put it. Glenn Crawley of Newquay, Cornwall, was up to his old tricks last week, and the local volunteer RNLI lifeboat crew once again scrambled to come to his aid. Crawley, who has been nicknamed Captain Calamity since 2007, when he was once rescued four times in four hours, actually refused assistance this time and subsequently capsized his beach cat in the surf while trying to sail ashore. Check out the viddy up there and you'll see the lifeboat crew circling like vultures as he drags himself and his boat ashore.

BARRING THE UNFORSEEN, this is the face of the next winner of the Vendee Globe, Francois Gabart, who should reach Les Sables d'Olonne aboard MACIF very early Sunday morning, thus setting a new race record of 77 days, give or take a few hours. I hope you've been following this one, as it's really been a doozy. For a significant portion of the race Gabart and his (now) second-place competitor, Armel Le Cleac'h on Banque Populaire, were more or less in sight of each other, and at several different points different sailors broke the record for miles covered in 24 hours by a singlehanded monohull (it's now up to 545, which frankly I find just staggering).

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.

IT WASN'T SO LONG AGO that liferaft survival-drift stories were fairly common. I personally know two people who spent more the 60 days in rafts (Steve Callahan and Bill Butler) and have read numerous accounts of similar experiences. Since the advent of reliable EPIRBs, however, it is now unusual for sailors abandoning yachts to spend more than a few hours adrift before getting picked up by someone. Hence all the fuss concerning Alain Delord, a 63-year-old French singlehander who was rescued from a raft 500 miles southwest of Tasmania late Sunday after spending three days adrift.