Man Overboard Procedure: Quick Stop, Lifesling and the Lift

The First Three Seconds: Shout, Throw, Point

The moment someone goes over, three things happen at once, and none of them is turning the boat. Shout. "Man overboard" and the side — it wakes the off-watch, tells the helm which way to turn, and starts the clock in everyone's head. Throw. Anything that floats goes over the side towards the person: the horseshoe, the dan buoy, the Lifesling, a fender, a cushion. It gives the casualty something to hold and, just as important, it marks the water. A head in a wave is invisible at 50 m (160 ft); a dan buoy with a flag is visible at 500. Throw more than one thing. A trail of floating debris leads you back.

Point. One person is appointed on the spot and does nothing else for the rest of the recovery: they stand, point at the casualty with a straight arm, and never take their eyes off them. Not to help with a sheet, not to answer a question. Losing sight of the person is the failure everything else is built to prevent, and the boat moves at 3 m (10 ft) a second while everyone is busy. The pointer is the most important job aboard for the next five minutes.

Press MOB — and Know What It Does Not Do

Every chartplotter and most sailing watches have a MOB button, usually a long press on a dedicated key. Press it in the first few seconds. It drops a waypoint at the boat's position and gives you a bearing and distance back to it. That is enormously useful and also incomplete: it marks where the boat was when someone pressed it, not where the person is now. The casualty drifts with the current and the wind at perhaps half a knot to a knot; the mark stays still. After five minutes in a 1-knot tide the person is 150 m (500 ft) from the waypoint. Use the MOB mark to get back to the area, and the pointer's arm to find the person.

An AIS MOB beacon on the lifejacket changes this. It transmits the casualty's actual GPS position to every AIS receiver within a few miles, including your own plotter, and the target moves with them. World Sailing's Offshore Special Regulations require personal AIS or similar locating devices for crew in the higher offshore categories, and the reasoning applies to anyone sailing at night: a beacon turns a search into a pilotage exercise.

The Sailing Methods

Quick Stop: stay close, stall the boat

The Quick Stop exists because distance is the enemy. The instant the shout goes up, the helm tacks — without touching the jib sheet. The jib backs, the boat comes through the wind and stalls, effectively hove-to, within a couple of lengths of the casualty. From there you bear away and circle the person under a rig that is doing very little, drop or furl the jib when there is a hand free, and set up a final approach from downwind on a close reach under mainsail alone. The boat stops head-to-wind with the casualty on the windward side, level with the shroud — the lowest, most stable part of the deck, and the one where the boat drifts down onto the person rather than away.

It needs one person who can sail the boat, which is why it is the method favoured for couples and short-handed crews: the person left aboard is the entire crew, and this manoeuvre asks them to do one thing at a time. Its weakness is that the rig is still up and the boat is untidy; with a spinnaker flying you must get it down first, and the Quick Stop becomes something slower.

Figure-Eight: reach away, tack, reach back

The Figure-Eight — the sailing cousin of the Williamson turn that ships use — trades closeness for control. You bear away onto a beam reach, sail four to six boat lengths, tack (never gybe), and come back on a broad reach until the casualty is on the bow, then harden up to a close reach for the final approach and let the sheets fly to stop. Because you are never running or beating, the boat stays under control throughout and the crew has time to get ready. The cost is distance: you are a hundred metres away before you turn, and in a seaway or at dusk that is a long way from a head. It suits a full crew that has practised the judgement of the final stop, which is the part everyone gets wrong the first time.

Lifesling: let the line find the person

The Lifesling is a horseshoe buoy on 40 m (130 ft) or so of floating line, stowed on the stern rail. You deploy it as the throw in "shout, throw, point", then sail the boat in circles around the casualty — the line tows behind and each circle brings it closer until the person can grab the sling and get it under their arms. Then you stop the boat, drop the sails, and haul them alongside on the line. Its virtue is that one person can do the whole thing without ever needing to place the boat precisely next to a head in the water. Its weakness is that it needs a casualty who is conscious and able to grab. For a stunned or unconscious person it does nothing, which is the argument for practising the other methods too.

The Powerboat Approach

A powerboat has no manoeuvre problem. Shout, throw, point, press MOB, then turn straight back — there is no rig to manage and you can be alongside in under a minute. Its problem is the propeller, and the freeboard.

Approach from downwind, slowly, so the boat drifts towards the casualty rather than over them. As the person comes within a boat length, engines to neutral. Before anyone reaches over the side or the casualty touches the boat, engines off. Not neutral: off. A propeller in neutral can still turn, a gearbox can be knocked into gear by a knee, and the person in the water is now within reach of the one thing aboard that can kill them instantly. The prop is the second danger after the water itself, and it is entirely within your control. Recover over the swim platform or the boarding ladder at the transom — which puts the casualty next to the propellers, which is why the engines are off — and keep them off until the person is aboard.

On a small open boat or RIB, the risk is that the second person goes in during the lift. Bring the casualty amidships, keep your weight low and inboard, and use the tube or the gunwale as a fulcrum: get their chest onto it first and roll them in, rather than trying to lift a body vertically out of the water.

The First Sixty Seconds

Written down, the sequence looks slow. In practice it is four people doing different things at once and the danger is that all four do the same thing. Assign the roles before you leave the dock, and rehearse them.

The Recovery: the Hard Half

Now the boat is stopped beside the person and the manoeuvre is over. This is where most real recoveries go wrong, and it is simple arithmetic. An 80 kg (175 lb) adult in wet foul-weather gear and boots, with a lifejacket, weighs well over 100 kg (220 lb) as they leave the water. They are cold; within ten minutes their grip is gone. The freeboard of a modern 12 m (40 ft) yacht is around a metre, a motor cruiser's more. Two fit crew leaning over a lifeline cannot lift that. Nobody can. The boat has always been the problem: it is the wall between the person and safety, and the tools to get over it must be rigged before the day you need them.

First, a line on the person. Before anything else, before the ladder or the halyard, get a line attached — through the lifejacket's lifting becket, the harness D-ring, or under the arms with a bowline. Once they are attached you have time; until then you have a person who can drift away from a stopped boat in seconds.

The halyard lift

On a sailing boat the answer is already aboard: a halyard led to a winch. Clip the spinnaker halyard or a spare main halyard to the Lifesling or the harness and grind the person up and over the lifelines. A dedicated four-to-one block and tackle, stowed with the Lifesling and hoisted on the halyard, lets one person lift a casualty by hand and is the single best piece of MOB kit a short-handed boat can carry. Practise hoisting a crew member from the dinghy alongside once a season. Everything that goes wrong — the halyard fouling the spreaders, the winch handle being in the wrong pocket — goes wrong then instead of on the day.

The ladder

A boarding ladder is for flat water and a conscious, warm casualty. In any sea it is a machine for breaking ankles: the stern pitches, the bottom rung is 1 m (3 ft) out of the water on one wave and buried on the next, and a cold person cannot hold on. Use it on a calm day at anchor and do not plan on it otherwise.

The parbuckle: for someone who cannot help

For an unconscious or exhausted casualty, roll them aboard rather than lift them. A parbuckle is a sail — the jib, or a purpose-made recovery net — with one edge secured along the toe rail and the other dipped into the water under the person. Hauling the free edge up rolls them up the topsides in a scoop, horizontally, which is both the only way two people can move that weight and the safe position for a cold casualty. It is slow and undignified and it works when nothing else does.

The swim platform

A powerboat's platform sits 30 cm (1 ft) off the water and is the easiest boarding point on any boat, with two conditions: the engines are off, and the sea is not slamming the platform down onto the casualty's head. In a swell, bring the person to the platform between waves and get their chest onto it, then drag rather than lift.

Cold Water: the 1-10-1 Rule

Cold water is not a slow killer. Dr Gordon Giesbrecht, whose research at the University of Manitoba underpins most modern cold-water survival teaching, summarises it as 1-10-1. About one minute to get your breathing under control after the cold-shock gasp — this is where people without lifejackets drown, in the first minute, inhaling water. About ten minutes of useful movement before cold incapacitation takes the hands and arms: this is the window in which the casualty can grab a sling or a ladder. And roughly one hour before hypothermia brings unconsciousness, in water around 10 °C (50 °F). Warmer water stretches every number; colder water compresses them.

Two consequences for the recovery. First, the casualty's ability to help you is a ten-minute resource. Everything that depends on them — grabbing the Lifesling, holding a ladder, clipping a halyard on — has to happen inside it, after which you are recovering a passive weight. Second, after a long immersion lift the person horizontally if you possibly can. Hauling a cold casualty vertically drops the blood pressure of a body that has spent an hour supported by water, and collapse on the deck after a successful lift is a known pattern. The parbuckle and the sail scoop are horizontal by design; a halyard lift can be made nearer horizontal by a second line under the knees. Then below, out of the wind, wet clothes off, and warm them slowly.

Single-Handed: the MOB Is You

Alone aboard, there is no procedure — nobody is left to run it. The only recovery that works is not falling in, and the entire effort goes there. A harness and tether clipped to a jackline whenever you leave the cockpit, and in the cockpit at night; a tether short enough that you cannot go over the lifelines — the World Sailing Offshore Special Regulations specify tethers and jackstays for exactly this reason, and a tether that lets you hang in the water beside a boat doing 6 knots is not much better than none. On the lifejacket, an AIS MOB beacon or a PLB, so that if the worst happens someone else knows where you are even if your boat sails on without you. On a powerboat, the engine kill lanyard clipped to you: a boat that stops when you leave it is a boat you can swim back to.

Solo sailors also trail a line astern and rig a way to climb back aboard from the water. Be honest about both: a knotted line is something to grab at 6 knots for about one second, and climbing a metre of freeboard unaided, cold, is beyond most people. Stay on the boat.

Practise With a Fender and a Bucket

Tie a fender to a bucket — the bucket fills, sinks a little, and drifts like a person rather than skating downwind like a fender alone — and throw it over without warning on a normal sailing day. Run the whole sequence: shout, throw, point, MOB, the manoeuvre, the stop with the fender at the shroud, and a line onto it. Then, in harbour, hoist a real person from the dinghy with the halyard and tackle you intend to use. The first time takes twenty minutes and shows you everything that is stowed in the wrong place. The fifth time takes four. The manoeuvre is a skill; the lift is a system, and a system is only rigged beforehand.

Overboard at Anchor: the Case Nobody Drills

The man overboard that actually happens on cruising boats is seldom the offshore one. It is a person stepping from the dinghy onto a dark transom after dinner ashore, a slip while relieving themselves over the rail at 2 a.m., a child on the foredeck. The water is calm and the boat is stationary, which is what makes it survivable — and also why nobody has a plan. Two things make the plan. The boarding ladder is down every night at anchor, before dark, so that anyone who goes in has a way out that does not depend on waking someone. And nobody goes ashore in the dinghy at night without a lifejacket, a light, and someone aboard knowing when to expect them back. The ladder is the recovery; the rest is the same procedure in slow motion.

It is also the one night when the boat itself can be the thing that moves. A person in the water beside an anchored yacht is fine; a person in the water beside an anchored yacht that is quietly dragging downwind at half a knot is not. That is why the night routine on our boats has two items, not one: the ladder is down and the anchor alarm is on. The first gets a person back aboard; the second makes sure the boat is still where they left it.

The Bottom Line

Shout, throw, point, press MOB. Tack at once and stall the boat, or turn straight back with the engine, and approach from downwind so the boat comes to the person and stops. Engines off before anyone touches the water. Then the part that decides the outcome: a line on the casualty, and a lift you have already rigged and rehearsed — halyard and tackle, parbuckle, platform. Getting back to the person is the easy half. The boat has always been the problem, not the sea, and the time to plan the lift is this weekend, alongside, with a volunteer in the dinghy.