DJose The Wall Street Journal had a cool story, buried on page D5 , about the SPOT Satellite Messenger. For those who haven't been keeping up, the SPOT is a floating, waterproof device that uses satellite technology to relay information – including your location – to friends, family or rescue teams. At $149 to $170, it is cheaper than most marine EPIRB units or Personal Locator Beacons on the market.

The Journal Story goes into reasonable detail, but it is late to the party. Our friend Ben Ellsion, who writes the Panbo marine electronics blog, has been writing about it for some time. He has done some testing, then more testing, and then an experiment. He even redlined a New York Times piece.

I have walked beaches all over the world and found many odd things: fenders, oars, a captain's hat, a bottle of Givenchy cologne, a large amethyst – even something that looked like a mine, one of those studded steel balls that stand several feet high. But the artifact I discovered on New Year's Eve is by far the strangest.

Looking over the photos of the Coast Guard boat plowing into a massive 25-foot wave and capsizing gave me a sickening feeling, the kind of feeling you get when you know somebody has been killed on the water. I started thinking what that last moment was like, when they saw the wave coming and had no choice but to drive the bow straight in.

After my last post, I put up an entry on Sailboatowners.com, a forum where they have been discussing the severe drought conditions at Lake Lanier in suburban Atlanta. My item simply noted that I wrote about the lake and it invited members to keep us current on the situation.

Bob, a frequent contributor to that site and one of the boaters marooned on Lake Lanier, offered this update.

Associated PressDrought has hammered Lake Lanier, leaving boaters high and dry.

I was on the boat not long ago, dropping off a few cases of antifreeze, when I got a headache. I went down to grab some Advil and found the last few tablets jangling in the jar.

I bought that bottle almost three years ago and it had 600 tablets. It's true that I take them six at a time, but could they really be gone? Then, the revelation hit me, one of those stop-and-sit moments that really put things in perspective.