The Coast Guard Auxiliary has some advice for single handers. Don't sail alone. It isn't safe. Perhaps that is the only "great insight" onm the topic.

However, many skippers, even of they do not single hand, do sail with inexperiencd crew members, who may not be capable of rescuing the skipper if he or she falls overboard.

The 1981 book, "A Manual of Single Handed Sailing" by Tony Meisel has several suggestions for the single-hander. May of these suggestions are also helpful to skippers who never sail alone, but do sail with inexperienced crew.

Meisel's chapter 8 deals with safety. He suggests many design features to help you stay onboard, and he also suggests a few for regaining your intended place on deck after a fall overboard.

1. Wear a proper harness and use jack lines run from the cockpit to the foredeck, and as close to the centerline as possible. The jack lines should be attached to through bolted padeyes. He recommends wire jack lines attached with swaged-end fittings or Norseman terminals.

2. "Some sort of ladder" (either a permanently mounted stern ladder, a quick release emergency boarding ladder reaching below the waterline, or steps on a transom hung rudder.

3. A trailing line (he suggests floating polypropylene line of approximately 75 feet long) with a floating ring on the trailing end.

4. Some method of attaching the trailing line to the self-steering tiller lines by a snap shackle, so that if you fall overboard and grab the trailing line, or the trailing life ring at teh end of that line, the self-steering will be tripped and the boat will round up.

5. The trip line in #4 above could be doubled so that the second line will trip the horseshoe and the man overboard pole (He suggests this when sailing with crew.

Tony Meisel's book is worth reading as are most books on the subject of cruising and cruising safety.

If one did fall overboard forward of the shrouds, on a six foot tether, I am not at all sure how exactly one would get back to the stern ladder without releasing the carbiner on one's tether, unless the boat has rounded up. Even a boat that has both sails luffing can make way faster than most people can swim if the wind is up.

Somewhere I recently read a suggestion that the prudent skipper tow a small boat behind either so that a sailor who falls overboard can get to the towline and access the boat. In a crewed boat the remaining crew can release the towline so that the boat is temporarily left behind with the hopefully temporarily lost crewmember. It is much easier to locate a released dinghy with a standing and waving crewmember in it than the head of an overboard crew member in the water.

I sail in the ocean, and have on and off since 1980. I often sail alone. I was knocked unconscious on the foredeck of a 35-foot cutter (a Baba 35) in the 1980s when a wave knocked me off my feet as I was securing the jib that I had just dropped. I was saved from going overboard by the high gunnels on that boat. The Skipper was in the cockpit at the time. We had a crew of two.

On another occasion when I was sailing a Catalina 22, I was nearly swept overboard while tending to my jib after the leech had begun to rip. I was wearing a harness, but in my haste to reach he foredeck before further damage occurred to the jib, I neglected to clip in.

On that boat, I did not have jack lines. Although it was a poor alternative, I used to clip in to the single lifelines on the weather side of the boat. That day I forgot to clip in. I caught a lifeline as I was sliding under it on my way into the water.

My current boat, an Ariel, has lifelines that are not attached to stanchions, but instead to the bow and stern rails, and in addition, to a pin rail, which is through bolted with U bolts around the shrouds, and to through deck bolted pad eyes and other through deck attachment devices backed by stainless steel and or marine plywood backing plates. I currently clip onto those lines, but have to unclip at the shrouds to access the bow. I plan to add jack lines made of a suitable webbing material. I like the fact that webbing lays flat on the deck, unlike wire.

I am considering emergency boarding ladders to be located on both sides at the low spot on the rail near the forward end of the cockpit on my Ariel.