I guess there are some more explanations necessary to understand what I were going to say :-)
Assuming the following situations:
a) If you are two persons on board and one goes overboard and the person in the water is unconscious and the sea is rough you will almost have no chance to bring the unconscious person alone on board again. If you are very good/experienced you might will have a little chance to "fix" the person nearby the boat without hurting him/her but what is extremely difficult. In this case you could hope other helping people arrive at your boat early enough.
b) If the person is not unconscious and not seriously injured the better strategy could be to bring the boat near the person and let him/her swim the remaining distance to the boat and let him/her go on board by the swimming ladder.
c) If the sea is calm and the person is unconscious you will have a chance to fix the person nearby the boat without hitting/injuring him/her.
Because the chance to survive in situation a) is extremely bad the only thing which makes sense in rough conditions (with only two persons on board) will be to do everything that nobody can go overboard. This is in my opinion much more important than to practice the professional MOB-maneuver (except you have a catamaran e.g. where the person maybe can be fixed between the hulls without hitting the person with the boat).
For situation b) you don´t need a professional MOB-maneuver.
In situation c) a good strategy could be to go backwards to the person to be rescued meaning you need no professional MOB-maneuver in the manner we are probably talking about. Beside this: The situation c) will be a extremely rare event (going overboard in calm conditions and being unconscious). I almost cannot imagine any situation (in warm water like in the BVIs).
The conclusion of this could be that it is better to always use life lines on the sea (especially when there are only two persons on board or they are not very experienced sailors) than teaching a „never sailed person“ one or two times the professional MOB-maneuver.
I hope this explains better what I was going to say in my posting before :-)
