It's just about realizing when to give up. Sometimes, if you wait too late, your options to find a nice landing spot are limited. During the '04 steeplechase, we pitchpoled my F18 pretty hard while I was skippering from the wire. If I had been able to keep my footing, we might have been able to save it. My crew had previously demonstrated a tendency to hang on a little to long so when I realized there was no way I was going to keep my footing, I grabbed his life vest pulling him with me as I went by...by that time, the boat was pretty much standing on it's nose anyway. We both landed cleanly in the water in front of the boat.

An example of a poor exit strategy is when I was crewing on a 29'er for the first time and for someone who hadn't yet fully grasped the concept of an asymetrical spinnaker. As we were getting overpowered by a gust, my skipper was expecting me to somehow do something to "depower the spinnaker" instead of him bearing away....anyway, the boat tipped over and a winglet grabbed the water and I was flung forward. I eyeballed a nice clean patch of water between the spinnaker and the jib and began to tuck for my dive. Then my trapeze line stopped me short and flung me head-first into the forestay. I took away two things from this experience: 1) make sure your skipper has a clue and 2) sail on boats that are fast enough that when things do go wrong, you'll be thrown clear <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Pitchpoles can happen pretty quickly - capsizing sideways is actually quite gentle and slow.