Cruising Southern Croatia

So after a prolonged break, I remount my blogging horse in an attempt
to catch up with all the pictures we've taken over the last two
months.

When I stop to think about it, a whole lot has happened in the last
little while.  Babies being born, parent's selling/buying houses,
traveling and visiting, moving, house maintenance, and oh yeah..
working!

Several months ago, our wonderful Auzzi flat-mates told us about their
adventures sailing around southern Croatia in a little cruise boat.
It sounded good to us, so in true Laura and Kevin fashion, we went
online and booked a trip without much thought or preparation.  But it
was a great deal on a six night cruise through Sail Croatia.  In late May, we flew
easyJet to Split Croatia (which cost nearly as much as our cruise did)
and jumped on a bus to the harbour.  It was a good thing our flight
wasn't delayed because we had a rather small window of time to catch
our boat before it left.

We floundered around at the harbour for a little while trying to
figure out which of the umpteen little cruise boats were ours

We found someone who seemed to be somewhat official, and she handed us
a little piece of paper and told us to sit down.  So we sat down and
watched while the things played themselves out.

Eventually our boat came into port and we went into our room!

According to the Captain, the boat was owned by his father and it's
about 60 years old.  It's made completely of wood, and so it's centre
of gravity is a little higher than newer boats with steal hulls.  This
means that it tends to take a little more time righting itself when
waves make it list from one side to the other.  The Captain said this
is good because it means it's less likely that his whiskey bottle will
fall over.

The Captain is the crustiest of Croats.  He definitely would
have been a pirate if tourism didn't pay better, and I'll bet he and
his crew were into interesting things during the Balkan war.  One of
the crew members actually yelled "Yar!" from time to time.

We slowly met all of the other passengers while we were in port in
Split.  They were all twenty-thirty something Auzzi's, New Zelanders,
Southies and Canadians living in London.  I'm not exaggerating, 26 our
of the 28 people on board fit that description.  So basically we were
in familiar territory, and could swap a lot stories about traveling
and living in London.

Eventually there was a mass exodus as all of the little boats steamed
out into the Adriatic.  We were given an itinerary by the company when
we bought our tickets, but the Captain treated the itinerary as more
ornamental than anything.  From day to day we would have no idea where
we were going or how long it would take to get there.  Every now and
again, someone would be nominated to be the brave one who has to ask
the Captain where we were going and if we were going stop for
swimming anytime soon.  The nominee would usually come back with a
confused look on their face saying "I think we're going to <blank> and
that we're going to stop for swimming after lunch, but I'm not
entirely sure".  The Captain spoke fluent Croatian, bad German and a
small smattering of English.

The boat itself was about 20-30 feet high, which made for a good 
diving board.

  So I did a lot of jumping into the ocean.  It was fun, so I was
rather unapologetic about it.

As you might imagine, with a boat load of people from Australia, New
Zealand and South Africa who live in dark and damp London, there was a
lot of sun bathers.

It was the thing to do.

They fed us breakfast and lunch in the galley.  We were responsible
for getting our own supper at the various ports that we stopped at
every day.  The food was surprisingly good considering it was made by
a bunch of Croat pirates.


It was really interesting watching the crew tie up the boats when they
came into shore.  Because a lot of the ports were very small, or
perhaps to reduce their mooring fees, they would tie the boats to each
other.  So when we wanted to go ashore, we would have to walk through
other people's boats.  Sometimes up to 8 other boats!

It was interesting walking through the other boats, because thankfully
they tended to clump people who spoke the same languages on different
boats.  So you would walk through one boat and hear only Croatian, or
German or English depending on which boat you were passing through.

We had some rather rough seas when we were on the unprotected side of
the Croatian islands.  I sat up at the front of the boat and rode the
anchor like a bucking bronco bull.  I took some videos of some of the
large seas and the nose of the boat went from 10 feet up in the air
straight down into the valley of a swell.  Probably about a 20 foot
high differential in about three seconds.  I really had to hold on.

Some other smaller boats that we saw were really pitching around even
more than we were.

There was much projectile vomit.  Poor Laura was stuck in our little
bathroom for the duration of the trip to Dubrovnik.  We rather
promptly bought some motion sickness pills.

The first mate was a really interesting guy.  He kept buying us rounds
of drinks at some bar, and he told us that he used to work on freight
ships for years and years.  He claimed to have been to every major
coastal country in the world.  The Captain also used to be the Captain
of big ocean liners during the period that tourists stayed away from
the Balkans in droves.

The cruise had one incident.  While the crew was happily playing cards
and the passengers were naively jumping into the water and splashing
about, the anchor was continually slipping in the sand while we washed
towards a sand bank.  The ruder got stuck and the Captain cursed up a
storm and tried in vain to get the boat off the sand.  Eventually he
ordered all the ship's movable ballast (we passengers) to the front of
the boat to try to lift the back end up a little bit.  So we got off
of our sun burnt behinds and squished into the nose of the boat.

After much ado, the rudder was free and we were on our way again.  The
first mate told me in confidence that the Captain had never done that
before and that he had been a little sloppy in that circumstance.

So all the rest of the excitement of that week occurred in port!  We
weren't at sea very much, most of the time we were in port in the
various towns and cities up and down the coast and islands of southern
Croatia.  It was nice, we could come back to our mobile hotel to sleep
after we were done with sight seeing, then we'd leave port early in
the AM while everyone was still sleeping.

Next I'll be going through all of the pictures for each of the cities
and towns that we visited.  Stay tuned!