SailTime Croatia Flotilla - Day 4

Day 4 - Tuesday 26th May

Milna Brac - Hvar - St Klement (Anchorage)

I give the briefing today - we’re going to sail around the island of Brac - passing Split to the North - then following round to Hvar Town. It’s a long sail - so we need to leave early - and there’s no wind.

After assessing the situation again - I realise I had mis-calculated the distances - used the scale of our big chart but planned the course on the smaller one - and consequently had set us up to do a 60 mile sail! No problem, we’ll just change the plans. Unfortunately, Little Wind was quick out of the blocks and had set off. Lola wasn’t quite ready to go, so I jumped on Catalina and we set off in pursuit. We were monitoring VHF channel 8 for ship to ship communications. I tried to raise Little Wind, but she had passed around the headland and maybe our signal was blocked. She had about 15 minutes head start - but we soon started to catch her - or so I thought - we were motoring along at 8kts at 2500 rpm - but it took us 2 hours - motor sailing in the wrong direction to catch her. When we finally did - they remembered to switch the radio on! We turned around and set off back for the island of Hvar - the short way - although I’m sure we were half-way around Brac - we had passed Split along the way.

Four hours later we got back to the entrance to Milna - and the wind had picked up nicely. I took the opportunity to practice tacking so we spent the next three hours carrying out many manoeuvres with Aiden, Sandra and Dee taking turns at the helm and on the winches - after about tack number 20 we were almost executing racing turns!

The sun was getting low in the sky now - so we headed into the channel toward Hvar Town. We checked in with Little Wind and Sue informed us they were heading in too - was that an “over and out” sign-off on the radio Sue? - big beer fine for that one!

A quick radio check with Lola informed us that there were no suitable anchoring spaces and all the moorings were occupied - so they had set off ahead of us to find an anchorage on one of the small surrounding islands. Little Wind headed into Hvar and were lucky enough to find a boat leaving a mooring - but we followed Lola. Bagpuss had found the perfect spot though - and by the time we all arrived - she had anchored and had a stern-line secured to the shore. We followed suit - with Sam on point in the dinghy - securing stern lines off Lola and Catalina.

It was going to be dinner on board Lola tonight and we had all the ingredients for spaghetti bolognese, which I’d volunteered to prepare. However, as our plans were scuppered by my map reading fiasco this morning - the sauce wasn’t prepared - and so it was ham and cheese for dinner! Good job the food on Catalina was better - lunch was a nice salad with eggs and a local cheese called pag! Very similar to parmesan and excellent served thinly sliced It’s all in the presentation though! A couple of glasses of wine - and its off to bed for another reasonably early night at around 10pm.