The boat is renamed, rebadged with Southport, Australia as home port, and proudly flying the Ozzie flag.
Time to go sailing! Still a heap of unfinished jobs but they can be done en route to somewhere else.
The excitement of a first passage in unknown waters is enhanced by an unknown boat, a bit like a blind date. You expect it to be interesting at very least. Although we know BB inside out by now, we have yet to see how she performs in her element.
Officially leaving the EU, clearing out of Slovenia, we motored in flat calm waters the ridiculously short distance of about 12 miles to the nearest port of entry into Croatia, a small town called Umag. The 48hp Yanmar diesel engine thrummed sweetly, as if it had never skipped a beat in its life. We only have a tiny ‘egg-beater’ of a propeller with two blades that fold together to reduce drag while racing, but it pushes us along at a respectable 6-7 knots.
Leaving our "home" of 3 weeks: Izola Marina, Slovenia
We motored past the first of what was to become typical scenery – old castles, fortresses, churches, built of stone atop high walls rising out of deep seas. You realize you are in a very old place.
Slovenian coast - church spires everywhere.
In Umag, the Port Captain asked how long we wanted to stay and explained the costs involved in purchasing a “vignette”. This is a fee for registration of arrival, fulfilment of requirements for navigation, navigational safety fees, light dues and information chart. For 3 months this came to about $AU550.
Accustomed as we are to paying for port entry and exit fees and cruising permits in the Sth Pacific, these fees never bother us. We accept it as our contribution to the cruising grounds we enjoy.
Our playground for this season is the Adriatic sea, an almost land-locked waterway that provides the best kind of sailing - flat-water with minimal ocean swell.
Flanking the left side of the Adriatic is the shapely calf and boot of Italy; on the right, several countries: Slovenia at the top, with very limited coastline, Croatia, with the lion’s share, Bosnia Herzegovina with scarcely a look-in, Montenegro, Albania, and Greece. Strange how there are so many nations on the right and only one on the left…
The west coast of Italy is shallow and uninviting, with few protected anchorages. Even the large port of Venice has dredges constantly digging out its entrance channel. On the other side, Croatia has it all, and it is easy to see why the Romans, Venetians, Illyrians, Slavs, Turks, amongst others, have fought for it over the centuries. Croatia is the “Gem of the Med”, with hundreds of islands and protected harbours to explore.
The Croatian cruising guide refers to 777 anchorages, so you are never more than an easy day’s sail from the next sheltered bay. Within those bays, there is usually an ancient historical site dating back to some inconceivable bygone era with ruins of mostly Roman monuments. They built them to last back then!
After checking in at Umag we motored to the middle of the wide basin and picked up a mooring. Within minutes a friendly man in an open wooden dory came over and charged us the mooring fee: 168 Kuna, (about $3.50) per metre of boat length. BB is 14.4m long (and an approximation won’t do). We asked how to say “thankyou” in Croatian: (“Hvala”). He corrected our use of the word we had learnt in Slovenia (“Hvala”) but we couldn’t pick up the subtle difference. To our ears they both sounded the same, but we didn’t want to offend anyone so soon.
It was our first night out on mooring, swinging to the wind instead of being tied up alongside a marina and it felt good. It took a couple of hours to get organised, to rig up a harness to lift the new outboard off the pushpit and lower it onto the back of the dinghy for the inaugural run. It was a Chinese 9.9hp 4 stroke motor called a “Hidea” (later to become known as the “Hideous”). But that first run it purred like a kitten.
Umag
Bright lights and music filled the night air. The foreshore was alive with busy sidewalk cafes, restaurants, colourful street stalls selling artworks, toys, bikinis, towels, snorkels and masks and other tourist paraphernalia, not unlike those we had seen near our hardstand home in Izola. (Well, I guess we were only a few miles down the road after all).
The next day we had our first sail and it was fantastic! BB skims along so gracefully in light airs she leaves all the more conventional cruisers sitting dead in her wake. Whilst the Bavarias and Beneteaus are motoring under bare poles, we glide by noiselessly, picking them off one by one with smug satisfaction. So this is why we chose a race boat!
The decision of which sails to bring with us and which to leave in the trailer/container had not been so easy. During our time on the hardstand in Izola, we had set ourselves the task of pulling out two or three sails each night after dinner, just before it got dark (around 9.30pm) and checking them out. We spread them out on the grassy strip at the water’s edge, measured and photographed them and made notes about their condition. There were some beautiful, almost unused sails amongst them, each one worth around 20 grand to buy new. It occurred to us that we had bought a highly valuable sail wardrobe and they had thrown the boat in for free.
On board now we have one carbon mainsail, chosen because it has 2 reef points which are necessary to reduce sail in strong winds. Unfortunately it doesn’t have any “slides” on it (which keep the sail attached to a track on the mast), but has a “bolt rope” instead. This means that when you drop the sail, it comes out of the groove in the mast and falls all over the boat – very messy and hard to see past when entering a crowded anchorage.
We ameliorated that problem by putting on “lazy jacks” – thin ropes that run from two thirds of the way up the mast to the boom on either side of the sail, like a giant open-weave spider web. These help to contain the sail as it drops onto the boom, where it is flaked back and forth like a concertina then tied down. It works well for sail control when you don’t have half a dozen octopus-armed crew spreading their long tentacles all over the flapping beast.
For our headsails, we chose a magnificent “number one” (biggest) genoa which is made of the most delicate filigree material, transparent and cellophane-like. This is an ultra-light sail, for the gentlest of breezes. Given the amount of motoring most boats do in the Med, we thought this would be a good choice. For the same reason, we included a lightweight bright yellow spinnaker. More on this later.
In case of heavier weather, we have a Number 4 (smallest) headsail, plus a couple of even smaller storm sails – which we did get to use on the trip across to Venice – more on that later!
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