When you ask "how often," that assumes that catamaran sailors do practice man-overboard drills. Most catamaran sailors don't like to "practice" anything. And I don't know where any would even be taught how to do a man-overboard drill unless they had taken some sort of certification learn-to-sail course. Some fleets have fun events that simulate man-overboard retrieval, but it is not retrieval of anything similar to a human being. Some of the boat-handling drills in Rick's seminars would help with man-overboard retrieval. But no complete drills that include learning the various techniques. I have read about them in various magazines, but never actually seen them applied in real life except when I have fallen off the boat (trapeze breakage) going to weather, and Rick circled around, came up to me to leeward, grabbed me by the butt of my trapeze harness, threw me on the tramp and yelled, "Sheet in the jib."

The extent of my personal retrieval experience as skipper is recovering a grandchild's hat. Oh, yeah, and the other day my dog fell off over the main beam and I grabbed him as he was coming out the back and hauled him onto the boat over the rear beam.

As I said, somebody needs to organize a seminar to cover all kinds of safety stuff like that.