Erna, the daughter of a Hamburg coastal skipper, loses her fiancé to the sea. In her grief, she first flees to relatives, then takes her fate into her own hands and starts working for a shipowner in Blankenese. When she slowly begins to develop feelings for a man again, he turns out to be a marriage swindler. But again she does not give in to despair. In her conciliatory attitude to life, she is able to settle a marital dispute between the shipowner and his wife and finally finds her own happiness in love - through a former friend who is himself a widower. She starts a family with him and the children of his deceased wife.