Father Falls Overboard Rescuing His Son in the Schlei Bay is the episode in which an easygoing family sail turns into an accidental man-overboard emergency. Joachim’s father strikes him in the face while trying to restart the outboard motor, sending him into the water; then, despite his size and poor swimming, the father jumps in after him. A passing couple pulls them to safety. The rescue briefly makes physical danger visible within a relationship otherwise shown through leisurely outings, but its aftermath is marked by embarrassment, concealment, and the father’s permanent withdrawal from sailing.

Background: Sailing Without Wind

The accident follows the father’s failed sailing-license examination. Of nine boats and eighteen candidates, he alone failed: the examiner had found him lying down for much of the test and said that without his wife’s help he would have needed rescuing. It took weeks before he went sailing again, and then only under his wife’s command. His return to the water was tentative, but he and Joachim found a version of sailing that suited them: outings on days when the air was so still that there was no need to set a sail.

On such mornings, the father watched the motionless leaves in the tall linden trees from bed and declared it sailing weather. Father and son went out with the outboard motor rattling, drifted across mirror-smooth water, sunbathed, ate their provisions, talked, and sometimes fished. These were not voyages driven by wind or sailing skill. Their pleasure rested in stillness and companionship, and in the father’s ability to make a windless day count as an invitation to go.

The outings also had a comic element of retreat. If the father spotted someone from the Rotary Club through his binoculars, he called out in alarm and the pair hid in a quiet cove. The boat offered a small refuge from social encounters, though the later accident would send them back to shore as the subject of a story other sailors eagerly repeated.

The Accident and Rescue

On the decisive outing, the father switched off the motor in the Great Reach and let the boat drift. The water glittered, and the weather was warm and quiet. After about an hour, he tried to start the engine again. He pulled the starter cord several times without success. Opening the engine cover and staring helplessly at its insides was already, for him, a remarkable technical effort, but neither that inspection nor another attempt solved the problem.

For what he treated as a final try, he gathered himself and seized the cord. Joachim, curious to see whether the engine would start, stood behind him. The father yanked angrily and at a slight angle. The cord struck Joachim full in the face. He stumbled backward and went overboard, disoriented by the blow and bleeding from the nose, but wearing a life jacket. The current was not strong, yet it carried him away from the boat quickly enough to make the separation urgent.

The father shouted for help, gesticulating from the boat. Then he jumped over its side. Joachim saw his overweight father make what seemed an ungainly leap and watched the boat move away, pushed by the father as he went in. The father took a long time to reach him; the child, dazed and afloat, saw his father’s distressed face approach slowly. Before the father could get to him, a couple in another boat lifted Joachim from the water with strong arms.

The father swam and paddled until he could climb, soaked and out of breath, up the rescue boat’s outside ladder. He trembled and embraced his son so tightly that Joachim had to cough. Joachim embraced him too. In the aftermath, it was unclear which of them was comforting the other. The rescue did not erase the accident’s violence: the father had caused the fall, but his first response was to enter the water himself and try to reach his son.

From Private Danger to Public Story

The rescuing couple kindly helped search for the family boat. They found it in the reeds and took it in tow. Wrapped in a blanket, the father saw the man light a cigarette and asked for one. He had not smoked for four years. The request is a small but telling aftermath to the ordeal: after the fear and cold, a former habit returned in the company of strangers who had just helped save them.

When they reached the Schleswiger Schlei-Segel-Club, a crowd was waiting. The sailors’ version of the episode turned the professor into its comic centre: he had knocked his son overboard, found himself in distress in a complete calm, and needed rescuing, all without a sailing license. The accident’s consequences therefore extended beyond the two people in the water. A private mistake became a public anecdote, linked to the father’s earlier failure at the examination.

On the way home, the father asked Joachim not to tell the family that evening, hoping the episode could remain their small secret for a few hours. Joachim’s mother and brothers naturally wanted to know why he had two blood-soaked cotton plugs in his nose. He lied for his father, saying he had run into the mast. The father nodded gratefully. The lie binds them briefly in complicity, but it cannot keep the story from the wider sailing community.

The End of Sailing

After the incident, the father never again boarded his sepia-colored JoMaHe Sailing Yacht. The outing thus ends more than the immediate emergency: it extinguishes his sailing enthusiasm. The contrast is sharp. He had returned to sailing on his own terms, choosing windless days when the boat could drift in sunshine, yet the very motor that made those trips possible became the instrument of his son’s fall and of his final departure from the water.

The episode holds affection and humiliation together without resolving one into the other. The father’s clumsy attempt to restart the engine causes the danger; his plunge into the water expresses the urgency of his response; the embrace afterward leaves comfort shared between them. But the public retelling and the father’s retreat from his boat remain. In the family’s version, the child protects his father with a lie; in the sailors’ version, the failed professor and the rescue become a circulating joke. The stillness that had made their outings possible is replaced by an incident that cannot be kept quiet and that ends the father’s life as a sailor.