Magazine · · 2 min read
German recreational boat licence (sea): questions and pass marks
30 of 285 questions, 60 minutes, two parts scored separately. Why the spread of your mistakes matters more than their number — and what comes on top of the theory exam.
30 questions from a catalogue of 285
The theory exam for the Sportbootführerschein See asks 30 questions: 7 basic questions and 23 sea-specific ones. You have 60 minutes. The official catalogue they come from contains 285 questions — 72 basic and 213 sea-specific, 90 of them with an illustration: signs, lights, sound signals.
About one question in ten appears — you just do not know which.
So roughly one in ten catalogue questions appears in the exam, and you do not know which in advance. Memorising single questions therefore helps little; understanding why an answer is right covers all the similar questions as well.
Seven mistakes, but not just anywhere
Each part is scored on its own. In the basic part, 5 of 7 must be right, so 2 mistakes are allowed. In the sea-specific part, 18 of 23 must be right, so 5 mistakes are allowed. Together that is at least 23 correct answers out of 30.
The weaker part decides. Practise it first.
What decides is the spread: miss the minimum in one part and the entire theory exam has to be repeated, even if the other part was flawless. Three mistakes in the basic part fail the exam, although only three mistakes were made in total.
The navigation task comes on top
In addition to the 30 questions there are 9 navigation tasks, 7 of which must be right. They are taken from the fifteen official navigation questions (no. 286 to 300) and solved on practice chart D49 — the mouths of the Jade, Weser and Elbe. The chart belongs to the BSH and is sold commercially; the tasks cannot be worked without it.
30 questions plus 9 navigation tasks — both count.
Fees, minimum age and deadlines are deliberately left out here. They change, and only the publisher's own publication is binding, never a learning site.
Understanding instead of ticking boxes
The questions come from the official catalogue of the Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration (ELWIS). Bootsschein-Trainer takes them over unchanged and writes its own explanation under each: why the right answer is right, a mnemonic, and the usual mix-up.
If you know why an answer is right, you recognise it in another question too.
Question 8 is an example: which side is called the windward side (Luvseite)? The answer is “the side facing the wind”. The mnemonic is “Luv is where the wind comes from” — and the typical mistake is swapping windward and leeward or equating them with right and left.
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