Honestly, dear, this has never happened to me before!

I was fortunate that I heeded Steve and Rune's advice.

Tie down your tiller!

I've been sailing for 5 years, and not once has the tiller come out of the rudder head.  Until this week.

The Laser's rudder head is on the boat pretty securely.  The clip does a good job of keeping it in place, and some have additional pins or split rings to back the clip up.  The tiller, however slides into the rudder head, and there are a few, unreliable, ways to keep it in place:

• friction - jam it in there, and hope it stays
• the pin -- there is a single pin to hold the tiller in the rudder head, but it can fall out
• the rudder downhaul -- the rudder can pivot up and down.  Except when you're coming into shallow water, you want the rudder down, and that's what pulling on the downhaul does.  The line can then be cleated onto the tiller (which also holds the tiller in place), but is pretty easy to release.

For two years, I sailed with these three mechanisms conspiring to hold the tiller in place.  And it worked.  Then Steve and Rune advised me to additionally tie the downhaul into a loop past the cleat.  They said that if the cleat/pin came undone, then this would at least prevent you from loosing the tiller (which doesn't float).  I figured (at the time) "why bother, this works fine as is!" but heeded the advice of the gurus anyway.

This week, I inserted the pin incorrectly, and didn't notice.  On the water, in heavy winds, I all-of-a-sudden felt the tiller come out of the rudder head, in the middle of a tack.  I was still holding the tiller, but almost capsized.  If I had gone into the drink, there's a good chance I would have lost the tiller to the bottom of the Ottawa had I not tied the downhaul post-cleat.

So yeah, tie down your tiller!