The PFD Debate Offshore Sailors Are Actually Having

On the afternoon of June 19, 2022, roughly 325 miles from Bermuda, a wave came over the rail of the sloop Morgan of Marietta and took her captain with it. Colin Golder was 74, an experienced offshore racer competing in the Newport Bermuda Race, sailing with a crew who — every one of them — had their harnesses clipped and their PFDs on. Golder did not. His crew got a Lifesling around him within minutes, but he lost consciousness before they could bring him back aboard, and did not survive. The panel US Sailing convened to investigate concluded that conditions that day called for full safety gear on deck, and that his failure to be wearing it was the central cause of his death.

It would be easy to end the story there — wear your gear, don't be like Colin — and plenty of writing about this incident has. But that framing skips past something every offshore sailor actually wrestles with: the question was never really "PFD, yes or no." It's a tangle of harder questions — what kind of gear, worn how, maintained on what schedule, overridden by whose judgment, and at what cost to everything else your body needs to do on a moving boat in the dark. Golder's death doesn't resolve that debate. It's evidence inside it, worth sitting with rather than filing away as a lesson already learned.

The Comfort Problem

Most PFD-harness combinations are, by sailors' own account, miserable to wear for a full watch: hot, heavy, chafing at the neck, restrictive exactly when you're reefing, trimming, or hauling a wet line. That discomfort has a predictable consequence. Sailors who find the gear intolerable in fair weather take it off, planning — reasonably, they think — to put it back on the moment things turn. But the moment that gets you rarely announces itself. A boat can go from comfortable to dangerous in the time it takes to walk forward and back. The sailor who isn't wearing a harness in that window isn't making a bad bet. He's making no bet at all, because he never got the chance to decide.

This is the least dramatic part of the debate, and probably the most consequential. It isn't really a disagreement about safety philosophy so much as an unresolved design problem: nobody has yet built a PFD-harness combination that experienced offshore sailors want to wear continuously. Until someone does, "wear it always" is a rule that quietly competes with the discomfort of doing the job.

What the Tether Actually Solves — and Doesn't

Assume the PFD and harness are on. Clipping into the boat with a tether is supposed to handle the worst case: go over, and you're still attached, still recoverable. But a single tether clipped at chest height creates a failure mode of its own. A sailor dragged alongside a moving hull is pulled face-down through the water, unable to right himself against the tether's own pull. Being clipped in doesn't eliminate the danger of going overboard — it changes what kind of danger you're in.

Modern practice has moved to address part of this problem directly, mostly by shortening the leash rather than rethinking the clip. Many offshore sailors now rig double-leg tethers — a short "work" leg of around a meter paired with a longer transit leg — so the shorter length can be used in the places most likely to put a sailor over the rail: the foredeck, the shrouds, anywhere close to the edge. Keeping the tether short enough that a clipped-in sailor genuinely cannot go over the lifelines is now widely regarded, including in the offshore regulations governing bodies like World Sailing publish, as one of the more effective ways to prevent a man-overboard event in the first place, rather than simply improving the odds of recovery after one.

That doesn't end the argument. Sailors still debate leg length, attachment point, and clipping strategy, because different sea states present genuinely different risks. A short tether that's exactly right for foredeck work in a breeze can feel needlessly restrictive moving fore-and-aft along a pitching deck in following seas. A tether clipped at the chest is easy to reach and quick to use, but some sailors prefer lower attachment points specifically to avoid the face-down drag scenario, at some cost to ease of movement. None of this has one correct answer. These are trade-offs that depend on the boat, the conditions, and the work at hand, and experienced sailors will keep arguing about them for good reason.

When the Gear Itself Fails

Then there's the debate that has nothing to do with whether a sailor puts the gear on, because he did. In July 2018, Jon Santarelli, an experienced 53-year-old sailor racing the Chicago Yacht Club's Race to Mackinac, lost his footing while trimming a sail near the stern of the TP52 Imedi and slid overboard, in conditions the race's own investigators later described as uncomfortable but unremarkable for the boat and crew — 20 to 25 knots of wind, six-to-eight-foot seas. He was wearing an auto-inflating PFD. It never inflated. His crew shouted the alarm, marked his position, and executed a quick-stop maneuver in under a minute — and still watched him slip under before they could close the distance.

The investigation that followed was hampered from the start: Santarelli's vest was destroyed during his cremation before it could be examined intact. Working from recovered remnants of the inflator, and with the Coast Guard's involvement, the Chicago Yacht Club's review panel couldn't say with certainty why the mechanism failed — but it did establish that the vest could have been twelve or thirteen years old, well past the roughly five-year service life generally recommended for that type of inflator. That distinction matters: this wasn't a clean case of a known defect. It's a case where the evidence needed to know for certain was lost along with the man it might have saved — its own kind of lesson about what "maintained" actually requires of a piece of gear nobody ever expects to need.

The Santarelli case is the strongest argument for sailors who distrust inflatables altogether and prefer foam-filled flotation that works whether or not a mechanism fires correctly. It's a fair argument — and an incomplete one on its own, because foam-filled vests are bulkier and hotter, which loops straight back to the comfort problem, and to sailors quietly not wearing them. There's no version of this debate where one camp is simply right.

What the Rules Actually Admit

If there were a clean, correct answer, you'd expect offshore racing's governing bodies to have found it and written it into the rulebook as an unconditional requirement. They haven't, not exactly. World Sailing's Offshore Special Regulations — adopted in some form by US Sailing and by most major offshore races, including the Newport Bermuda Race and the Chicago Mac — call for flotation to be worn on deck under specified conditions (routinely from sundown to sunup, and more broadly whenever conditions warrant), and then explicitly hand an exception to the boat's captain: gear may be set aside when the person in command judges conditions allow it. Not every race adopts the same category of these regulations, and requirements vary by division and organizing authority. This is prescription, not universal law, and it's worth being precise about that rather than treating it as a single rule binding every boat the same way.

What doesn't vary is the underlying acknowledgment. The people who investigate these incidents for a living have concluded that a blanket rule doesn't fit every boat, crew, or hour of a passage — that judgment has to sit somewhere, and the person best positioned to exercise it is standing right there on deck.

The Standard the Crew Actually Follows

That judgment doesn't stay contained to the person exercising it. A crew reads its skipper before it reads the rulebook, and long before it reads the weather. If the person in command treats a harness as optional in borderline conditions, that becomes the standard aboard that boat, whatever the written policy says — not because anyone announced it, but because a crew instinctively calibrates its own caution to the example set at the top. A captain who suits up without exception, even when it's uncomfortable and even when nothing seems to be building, is teaching a lesson that has nothing to do with words. The opposite lesson gets taught just as effectively, and just as silently.

This doesn't shift responsibility away from the individual sailor — every person on deck still owns the decision to gear up. But it does mean a captain's personal habits are never only personal. They set the weather every crew actually sails in, long before the real weather arrives.

Back to Colin Golder

Which brings the debate back to where it started, because Golder's case isn't a counterargument to anything above — it's a demonstration of exactly this gap. His boat had a real safety standard: every other person on deck was properly geared, and the crew's man-overboard response was fast and disciplined enough that investigators praised it. The standard existed. It simply didn't reach the one person who, as captain, was presumably the one who'd set it.

That's the harder and more useful lesson sitting inside this story. A boat can get every collective decision right — the gear it carries, the drills it runs, the culture it builds — and still lose someone if personal discipline is the one place the standard doesn't reach. Golder's case doesn't settle the debate about which gear or which rule is correct. It demonstrates the one piece the debate can't design its way around: consistency has to be personal, or none of the rest of it matters.

The Watch

None of this — the comfort trade-offs, the tether physics, an inflator sitting past its service life, the standard a captain sets without meaning to — was ever the part anyone could argue away. A sailor can't govern the wave that finds the rail, or the sea state that turns a chest clip from a safeguard into a hazard. What he can govern is narrower, and entirely his: which gear is on his body before he steps on deck, whether that gear has been checked on schedule rather than trusted on faith, and whether the standard he holds his crew to is the one he's actually holding himself to.

That's really what seamanship is — not the skill on display once the wave already has you, but the string of ordinary, unglamorous decisions made in the calm beforehand: the gear checked, the habit kept even when it's inconvenient, the standard set before anyone is watching closely enough to notice whether it held. Golder's crew couldn't have stopped that wave. Every one of them had already decided, long before it came over the rail, what they could actually control — and had been deciding it, watch after watch, for years. The emergency only reveals which decisions were already made. It never makes them for you.

[Draft for review — Leadership & Teamwork / Seamanship crossover; Airtable record: The PFD Debate Offshore Sailors Are Actually Having]

Sources & Further Reading

US Sailing, Report on the Man Overboard Death of Colin Golder — 2022 Newport Bermuda Race (October 24, 2022). ussailing.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/NBR-Morgan-of-Marietta-Report-10242022-FINAL.pdf

US Sailing, US Sailing Releases Report on Bermuda Race Sailor Overboard Incident (October 27, 2022). ussailing.org/news/us-sailing-releases-report-on-bermuda-race-sailor-overboard-incident

Chicago Yacht Club, Review Committee Report on the Fatal Accident Involving Imedi During the 2018 Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac — summarized via Cruising Club of America. cruisingclub.org/news/accident-report-chicago-mac-race

CBS Chicago, Chicago Yacht Club's Report on 'Race to Mackinac' Drowning Prompts Safety Changes (February 25, 2019). cbsnews.com/chicago/news/race-to-mackinac-drowning-report

World Sailing, Offshore Special Regulations, including US Sailing prescriptions on flotation and safety harness use. Summarized via Cruising Club of America, Safety Harnesses and Tethers (Safety Lines) for Sailboats. cruisingclub.org/article/safety-harnesses-and-tethers-safety-lines-sailboats

West Marine, Safety Harnesses, Tethers and Jacklines — West Advisor, on double-tether practice and World Sailing tether-length guidance. westmarine.com/west-advisor/Safety-Harnesses-Tethers-and-Jacklines.html

Fisheries Supply, Sailing Harnesses & Marine Safety Tethers — reference on ISO 12401 compliance and dual-leg tether configurations. fisheriessupply.com/safety/harnesses-and-tethers

Note: this article draws on publicly available accident investigation reports and marine-safety industry references current as of 2026. It is not a substitute for a boat's own safety protocols, a governing body's current rulebook, or manufacturer guidance for specific gear.