Struggling to remove the number one genoa in a squall, the foredeck man momentarily forgets the “one hand for yourself, one hand for the ship” axiom. You’ve taken the boat almost head to wind in an effort to make it easier to get the flogging sail inboard. There are only two of you aboard, and one has to steer. An errant wave knocks the boat completely head to wind, and the jib backs. Plunging over the back of the wave, the bow is buried in the trough behind, with green water two feet over the stem. The man on the foredeck had unwisely clipped his harness to the lifelines; as he is knocked over the side by the backed jib, his weight fetches up on the end of the tether, and the sudden loading parts the lifeline.
What next?
Get the man overboard gear over the side, right? As you struggle with the man overboard pole, which is attached to the backstay, the flag catches in the upper pole holder, and tears off as you desperately yank on the pole in an effort to free it. With the pole at last over the side, its tether fetches up on the horseshoe ring in its rack on the stern rail, jamming the ring in its holder. You feverishly tear the ring out, tos-sing it over the side. Fortunately, you remember to discon-nect the strobe from the stern rail, so it gets over before the combined drag of the pole and horseshoe can tear the lanyard out of the light. A seeming eternity, all this has taken only 30 seconds from the time the man went over the side, and with the boat traveling at six knots, the man is only 100 yards astern. But if the gear had hung up at any stage, or if you didn’t react instantly to the man overboard suppose the errant wave also knocked you off balance in the cockpit, disorienting you he could easily be 200 yards away – or more.
While perhaps nothing can reduce the time it takes you to react to such an emergency, there’s a lot you can do to improve the deployment of man overboard gear. You can start by practicing. It’s doubtful if one sailor in 10 has ever bothered to toss a lifering over the side, much less test the whole system. For some reason, we don’t par-ticularly like to think about disasters like a person lost overboard; it’s as if by ignoring it we reduce the possibility of it happening. Boat manufacturers hardly help, either. When you last went to a boat show, how often was your attention directed toward safety gear stowage, compared to the time spent oohing and aahing over the microwave and trash compactor? Come to think of it, when did you last see a boat at the boat show that even had the safety equip-ment aboard?
Despite the fact that most boats that undertake even moderately venturesome coastal cruising are equipped with horseshoe rings, strobes, and man overboard poles, boat manufacturers rarely make allowance for the stowage and deployment of this simple safety gear, much less such heavy and awkward items as life rafts. Instead, the safety conscious owner is left to wrestle with the prob-lem, which aboard most boats lies somewhere on the priority list behind the color of the cabin cushions and a lit-tle ahead of the tablewear.
Usually, after a bit of soul searching, the owners of most boats end up with some variation on the same arrange-ment: horseshoe rings in racks on the stern rail, man over-board strobes hanging on the lifelines nearby, and man overboard pole either attached horizontally to the lifelines of vertically to the standing backstay. Then the fun begins. In an effort to keep all the lines un-tangled, they are coiled up and secured in some fashion. What you end up with is a nice, neat pile of gear that can’t be deployed in much under a minute.
Racing boats typically give safety gear more thought. First, they are required to carry extensive man overboard equipment to compete in offshore racing events: second, the equipment must not interfere with the racing efficien-cy of the boat. For example, boats racing in Category One events (off-shore) must carry two horseshoe rings equipped with drogues, dye markers, and man overboard lights, plus at least one man overboard pole. The stowage of this for-midable array of equipment is done in a number of ways some good, others not so – rarely seen aboard cruising boats.
