The Parents Fail Their Sailing Exam is the comic but consequential climax of Hermann and the narrator’s mother’s attempt to take up sailing. On the Schlei, a practical test in rising winds turns Hermann’s carefully prepared new pursuit into a humiliating ordeal: his wife manages the boat, while he falls, becomes sick, and finally lies on the floorboards. She passes the exam; he is the sole failure among eighteen candidates. The reversal punctures his confidence, but sailing does not disappear from family life altogether.

The ambition before the test

Hermann and the narrator’s mother began a sailing course, though their first experiences aboard suggested very different prospects. Hermann felt unwell on the first trip and was comfortable only sitting down. The narrator’s mother, by contrast, was delighted by the air, the speed with which the shore receded, and the unfamiliar view of their town from the water. Hermann retained his enthusiasm, but the narrator heard a note of disillusionment in his voice after that initial outing. Even during the course, he missed lessons more than once because he preferred to concentrate on buying a boat.

A magazine advertisement led him to the Sepia, a relatively inexpensive keelboat with a cabin, an outboard motor, and standing headroom of about 1.70 metres. Its decisive selling points were the claims that it could not capsize and could not sink. Only five boats of that type existed. Before either parent had earned a sailing certificate, the boat had been hauled from Cologne to Schleswig by its builder. Hermann stood upright, knees locked, as the trailer arrived at the harbor: the purchase had made his sailing ambition tangible before the lessons had made him proficient.

The family argued over what to call the boat. The narrator’s brother argued for the Nautilus, but the narrator’s mother proposed combining the first two letters of Joachim, Martin, and Hermann. The name JoMaHe was fixed at the launch, when a small bottle of sparkling wine was thrown against the hull and left its first little dent in the plastic. At the Schleswiger Schlei-Segel-Club, the unfamiliar make had not been heard of before. The exam would soon test not the boat’s advertised resistance to disaster, but its owners’ ability to handle it.

A test in strengthening wind

Two months later, the practical examination began after a theoretical test that went well for both parents. Hermann finished first and passed the theory with no errors; the narrator’s mother passed with four. For the practical portion, however, the wind was strong, at seven on the Beaufort scale. Every candidate had to wear yellow oilskins, a life jacket, and a red wool hat for visibility. The narrator remembers his heavyset father looking absurd in the gear, and remembers how quickly the good mood that followed the theory gave way when the examiner called the couple to board their small boat.

They managed to leave the sheltered side of the breakwater and raise the sail. The difficulty began when they were told to tack toward a pontoon across open water. The wind caught the sail and heeled the boat sharply. Although Hermann had been observing the rule to keep one hand on the boat, the jolt made him slip on the wet planks and fall. As the narrator’s mother tried to turn the boat into the wind, Hermann struggled to get upright, was struck on the head by the boom, and fell again. The examiner’s questions came through a megaphone from a motorboat, but the examination continued in increasingly difficult conditions.

The boat struck the pontoon with force, throwing Hermann down a third time. His wife brought the dinghy under control and sailed the next maneuvers alone while he remained on the floorboards with his eyes closed, even as she called for his help. When he finally sat up, he was nauseated and vomited into the Schlei. His wife managed to turn the boat into the wind and settle it. The spectacle was not simply of a novice making mistakes: the test’s practical demands had shifted onto her while the candidate being assessed was incapacitated.

The reversal at sea

When the narrator’s mother asked Hermann to hold the main halyard while she adjusted the lines aft, a gust pulled the rope through his hands. The sail came loose and the line ran down the mast. In wind that had risen to force eight or nine, she climbed the mast to thread it back through. The examiner warned her over the megaphone and asked why her husband was not helping, but she was already faster than the rescue boat. She raised the sail, steered back to the harbor, and docked properly.

Hermann crawled out of the dinghy as if drunk and crossed the grass toward the boathouse without saying a word. The image the narrator retains is of a broken figure in yellow oilskins, life jacket, and red hat. The examiner later announced that, among nine boats and eighteen candidates, Hermann alone had failed. His explanation was direct: Hermann had spent most of the examination lying down, and without his wife the officials would have had to rescue him. The written exam had made him the strongest candidate on paper; the practical test made the contrast between theory and action impossible to miss.

What followed

That evening Hermann put his sailing books in order on the shelf and gave the knot rope to the Family dog to play with. The tidy arrangement of the books follows an episode in which reading and theoretical preparation could not substitute for staying upright and responding to the boat. Yet the failure did not end the family’s sailing immediately. Several weeks passed before Hermann went out again with the family, this time under the narrator’s mother’s command.

The episode therefore records both a defeat and a redistribution of authority. Hermann had driven the purchase and entered the examination with perfect theoretical marks, but at sea his wife kept the boat moving, recovered the loose line, and brought it safely into port. His later return to sailing was tentative and explicitly under her direction. The exam’s humor rests on the reversal of their roles, while its lasting consequence is quieter: the narrator’s mother emerges as the more capable sailor, and Hermann’s enthusiasm survives only in a diminished, more cautious form.