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.

I PLAY THIS GAME with crew on offshore passages sometimes, just to mess with their heads. I tell them the island we're bound for doesn't really exist--that evil cartographers just made it up and put it down on charts so that silly sailors like us would try to go there. If you're a skeptic at heart, this is a perfectly feasible scenario.

Case in point: just last week a team of Australian geologists aboard the research vessel Southern Surveyor decided to check out a place called Sandy Island that some of their charts said lies at 19.22 S 159.94 E in the Coral Sea between Oz and New Caledonia (see image up top). The reason they were curious was that some of their other charts said there was nothing there. And when they got there they found the other charts were right. No island. Not even any shallow bottom features. Just soundings straight down to 1,400 meters.

Talk about cruising with a purpose. Some people go sailing to break records (see, e.g., Reid Stowe), some go to attract publicity (see Reid and/or Jarle Andhoey), some go to find God (or themselves), and most go just for the hell of it. But here's a guy--a 38-year-old Turkish business executive named Ramazan Noyan Culum--who sailed all the way from Bodrum, Turkey, to Plymouth, England, covering some 2,500 miles over seven months in a 16-foot boat, just so he could continue to harass a waitress he fell in love with who he knew despised him.

And what does he get for his trouble? Having finally reached England (home to his paramour, Courtney Murray, who he first encountered in a restaurant in Cyprus while on holiday seven years ago), Cullum and his little boat Ninova were immediately detained by the UK Border Force last Friday (see photo up top) and he is now slated to be deported back to Turkey.

I'm just catching up with the latest edition of the Vendee Globe, which started 10 days ago from Les Sables D'Olonne (see photo up top) while I was offshore sailing Lunacy to Puerto Rico. I wasn't too surprised to find that several boats (5 of the 20 that started, or 25 percent of the fleet) almost immediately had to quit because of damage they suffered, as this seems to be Standard Operating Procedure in round-the-world races these days. But I was a bit chagrined to see that two of the five casualties were due to collisions with fishing boats and that nine different boats (i.e., almost half the fleet!) are under protest for violating the traffic-separation scheme off Spain's Cape Finisterre.

It's one thing to run a top-flight cutting-edge sailboat race in which some vessels prove too fragile to finish the course. It's quite another to have people sailing boats like this as though they were bumper cars.

WE'RE HERE! In the photo, if you look carefully, you'll see the lumpy bumps of dry land--the island of Culebra to be precise--that we encountered at sunrise yesterday morning as we swooped in from the north on a moderate east-southeasterly breeze. By 1030 hours we were tied up at the fuel dock at the Puerto del Rey Marina in Fajardo, awaiting a U.S. customs inspection.

This, strange to say, focussed largely on our garbage. We answered several questions about the food we bought in Bermuda (all of it processed stuff or fresh produce that, of course, had originally been imported from the States) and our two small bags of garbage, composed mostly of plastic packaging we hadn't thrown overboard en route, were then quarantined. We subsequently had to pay the marina $15 to remove these biohazards from the boat.

HAVING SUFFERED NO DAMAGE while lying in port during Superstorm Sandy, Lunacy at last departed New Hampshire at 1000 hours last Thursday. Aboard with me were two pick-up crew enlisted through Offshore Passage Opportunities: Minnie Burke, 23, a young adventuress from Virginia, and Chris Salas, 41, a doctor from Rhode Island. Neither had much, if any, offshore sailing experience, and I was careful not to sugarcoat our prospects. I told them what I tell anyone who proposes to sail from New England to Bermuda in the fall: this is normally a difficult passage; you will be sailing in winds over 30 knots; you will be uncomfortable.

I was as good as my word. Indeed, I was thrice as good.