Most man-overboard drills are taught in the Solent or off a sailing school pontoon in light air and slack water, and most of them assume the casualty stays roughly where they fell in. In the Channel that assumption is wrong, and the wrongness is the whole problem. A tidal stream of three or four knots, normal off the Cap de la Hague or in the Alderney Race, moves a floating person the length of a football pitch every minute. The good news, and it is genuinely good news, is that the same stream that sweeps the casualty away also sweeps you away, at almost exactly the same rate. Once you understand that, tidal-water recovery becomes less frightening, not more.
I have run this drill for real once, off the Casquets, when a crewmember went over the side reaching for a fender. It was not the Solent. The water was moving, it was cold, and the lesson I took away was that the textbook quick-stop got us back to him faster than any clever manoeuvre would have, precisely because we both drifted together.
The tide moves you both
This is the single idea to fix in your head. A person in the water and a yacht lying stopped are both carried by the same tidal stream. Relative to the seabed they are racing downtide together; relative to each other they are barely moving. If you take the way off the boat quickly and let it sit, the casualty does not vanish downtide away from you, because you are going downtide too.
That is why the textbook fear, that the tide will carry the person miles before you can turn round, is overstated if you act fast. The danger is not the tide separating you. The danger is the seconds you waste, the way you can lose sight of a head in a lumpy Channel sea, and the difficulty of the final approach and the lift. Cold is the clock that matters: in Channel water of 12 to 15 degrees in early summer, useful function in the hands and arms fades within minutes, and a casualty who could help themselves at the start often cannot a quarter of an hour later.
The first ten seconds
Whatever method you favour, the opening moves are the same and they are about not losing the person.
- Shout "man overboard", so the whole crew knows.
- Throw flotation immediately, a horseshoe and a danbuoy, even if it lands short. It marks the spot and it drifts with the casualty.
- Hit the MOB button on the plotter. It drops a mark, but remember that mark is fixed to the seabed and the casualty is not, so it is a starting reference, not a target.
- Detail one person to point at the casualty and do nothing else. In a tidal Channel chop, a head is gone from view in seconds. The pointer is the most valuable crewmember aboard.
That sequence buys you the thing tides threaten most: continuous visual contact.
Why the downtide approach wins
For the recovery itself, the method the RYA teaches for sail and the one that works best in a stream is to set the boat up so it ends the approach pointing into the wind with the sails depowered, coming alongside the casualty on the leeward side, aft of the mast. In tidal water there is a refinement that makes a real difference: you want to be drifting at the same rate as the casualty during the final approach, which means working the boat upwind of the person and letting it sail down to them while you control the last few boat lengths with the engine.
The reason to recover on the leeward side, not the windward, is that a yacht has far more windage than a person. Set up to windward and the hull blows down onto the casualty, which sounds helpful but in practice means the boat sails away from them faster than they drift, and you keep missing. Approach so the casualty ends up on your leeward, sheltered side and the boat sits beside them instead of crabbing off downwind.
The quick-stop, tacking the boat round without touching the headsail and motoring or sailing a tight circle back, is the fastest return and it keeps the person close. In a strong stream that closeness is exactly what you want, because every extra boat length is extra time in cold water and extra chance of losing sight of the head.
The lift is the hard part
Getting back to the casualty is the bit drills practise. Getting them out of the water is the bit that drills, using a fender or a lifebuoy, never properly rehearse, and it is where shorthanded crews come unstuck. A waterlogged adult in foul-weather gear can weigh well over 100 kilograms, and you cannot armstrong that over a topsides at the best of times, let alone in a seaway with two people aboard.
So decide your recovery method before you sail, not over the side of the boat at the moment of crisis. The realistic options for a small crew are a dedicated recovery sling or strop hauled with a halyard on a winch, a boarding ladder if the casualty can still climb, or a recovery scoop or net. The single biggest improvement a Channel cruiser can make is to fit and rig something that lets one person on deck winch a limp body aboard, and the lift gear belongs on your night-passage checklist alongside the harnesses and lifejackets the night sailing equipment for French coastal passages article runs through. If your only plan is "we'll grab them", you do not have a plan.
This is also where keeping the casualty conscious and cooperative for as long as possible pays off, which loops back to cold. The faster you are alongside, the more they can help with the lift, the easier the whole thing is.
Call for help early, not late
The instinct shorthanded is to concentrate entirely on the recovery and call for help only if it goes wrong. Reverse that. If you are down to one person sailing the boat, get the alert out early using the French distress and safety call procedure, because a DSC distress alert on VHF gives the rescue centre your position automatically and a lifeboat or helicopter takes time to arrive. CROSS Jobourg covers the central Channel and CROSS Gris-Nez the eastern Channel, both keeping watch on VHF 16 and DSC channel 70 around the clock. You can always stand the alert down once the casualty is safely aboard. You cannot recover the minutes you spent not calling.
Rehearse it where the tide runs
A drill done in slack water teaches you the wrong reflexes for the Channel. Practise it in a stream, with a fender as the casualty, on a passage day when the tide is running. Time how long it takes to stop, return, and come alongside. Try the lift, properly, with a sling and a winch, so the gear is rigged and you have done it once before the day it counts.
If you are coming to the Channel from the Mediterranean, where MOB drills are run in near-static water, the adjustment is mental as much as practical, and it is worth reading up on how the Alderney Race and Raz Blanchard tidal gates behave so the speed of the water stops being a surprise. The tide is not your enemy in a recovery. The clock is. Act in the first ten seconds, keep eyes on the casualty, recover to leeward, and rig the lift in advance, and a Channel man-overboard becomes survivable rather than the nightmare the slack-water drills never prepared you for.
