The place where I document the stupid stuff I do
We eventually made it back to our home harbour without any further incident. Queued up for the fuel for what felt like hours but then had the final photo.
Had the final meal, drank the final beers and then partied with some crazy Hungarians until the harbour police turned up and threatened to call the cops.
Spent a final few hours in Dubrovnik Old Town killing time until my flight and eventually made it home. Took quite a few days to recover.
We set off from ACI Slaton heading for Sipanska Luka. Everything was beautiful. Three of us started the day with a swim in the sea and then we headed for the pool in the marina which had a pool bar.
Unfortunately the weather wasn’t hot enough for us to sit at the pool bar and have a beer…but we still had a morning beer.
We set sail for Sipanska and I took the boat off the mooring with some great coaching from Michal. I took us out into the main body of water heading for Sipanska and we decided to raise the genoa. We sailed along like this for a while and turned off the engines. We were making about 5kts and the winds were good so we decided to raise the main sail. We didn’t want the Genoa bumping about as we put the main sail up so we furled it away…a bit. In hindsight we should have furled it away entirely but hindsight is a bugger. It took us a while to get the mainsail up due to various problems and all this time the Genoa was flapping about. This flapping managed to loosen the shackle that attached the Genoa to the sheet until the shackle undid completely and shot the length of the boat like a bullet narrowly missing taking out Goochy. So now we had a mainsail half up and a severely flapping Genoa that we now had no control over. We managed to furl the Genoa some more to get rid of that problem for now, and then we carried on with the mainsail. It was at this point we put the first reef sheet into the electric winch to put some tension in it. Sadly we came straight out of the jammer and onto the electric winch at a bad angle. So when we started the electric winch it ripped the sheet out of the jammer and we broke it. So now we had a broken Genoa and a broken jammer, but we had a mainsail up.
Unfortunately on a Catamaran you can’t really sail on just a main as the boat becomes unbalanced and keeps heading into wind. So we dropped the mainsail again and started heading to a protected bay to make repairs.
We found a decent enough spot to park and anchored. We found a spare shackle and put the sheet back onto the Genoa and then tried to furl it away completely only to discover we’d over rotated the self furling jib mechanism thing and couldn’t put it away. So we made some more repairs, fixed that problem and then had a beer and did a little swimming.
Finally the time came to head to Sipanska so we decided to weigh anchor and get ready to go. We had some issues with the anchor earlier on the trip where the anchor chain would sometimes bundle up near the winch instead of dropping neatly into the anchor chain locker. This time it bundled up before we could stop it and knocked the anchor chain off the winch. This meant the anchor chain was attached to nothing and instead of raising the anchor chain we deposited 100m of chain onto the seabed. Fortunately the end of the chain is attached to the boat by a line so we were able to drag a few metres of chain back into the boat by hand, attach it the winch and started lifting the anchor again. This time I occupied the locker next to the anchor chain and kept jamming to end of the boat hook into the pile of chain to make sure there was room for the anchor chain to drop neatly.
We eventually made it to Sipanska for some much needed food and wine.
End result – we snapped some plastic off the jammer.
Kamil [ the skipper of the other yacht in our “flotilla” ] brought along his e-foil. It’s like a powered surfboard with a foil underneath that lifts the whole thing out of the water when you get going. Pretty bloody hard to do but I managed to almost get the hang of it before becoming exhausted and cold.
Ston is a beautiful town that is famous for having the longest maintained wall in Europe or something. Turns out the wall is also a pretty excellent hike with views from the top. Due to me being a bit of an early bird I left the rest of the crew on the boat and went for a walk into town before it got too hot.
I decided to wait for the rest of the boat at the top of the walls and so bought a ticket to visit the fort and walk the walls. I had a leisurely stroll up the walls taking it pretty easy. It was a hard climb but the views were fantastic.
Turns out that Ston built the fort and the walls to protect the salt making pools in the picture above on the right. I also learned that the word salary comes from the word salt and that roman soldiers used to be paid in salt.
Anyway, the rest of the crew of my boat decided it was a bit hot by the time they got into town and went for beer instead. I joined them!
Our fantastic skipper showing off his boat. This trip has certainly been a lot more relaxed than other voyages I’ve been on. All thanks to this very good friend of mine
Having been in Dubrovnik for three days I was pretty ready to get out of the place. Beautiful buildings, excellent restaurants and lots of stuff to do and see but there were so many tourists it became a little annoying, and this was in the quiet season.
We had a final lunch and a few beers on the main street and headed out to ACI Marina Dubrovnik to collect our 45ft Catamaran Tuvalu.
The obligatory sailing sunset post
I got invited to go on a bit of a sail around Croatia. I was unsure for a while but at the last minute decided it sounded like a stellar idea. Unfortunately we were picking the boats up on the Saturday but the only flight I could get would put me in Dubrovnik on the Wednesday before. So a few days in Dubrovnik it was.
After the pretty tiring walk around the walls [ steps soooooo many steps ] I opted for some breakfast and it was served with black olives. This is my kind of country.
Pretty sure the rest of that day was spent snoozing and hanging out with the two Josh’s and Amber.
The following day I decided to have lunch at the top of the mountain overlooking the city. It was a little expensive to get up there [ 25 euros for a 3 minute journey ] but the sights were stunning and the meal wasn’t actually that expensive for Dubrovnik.
Due to me being a complete idiot I only booked my apartment until Friday morning. I kinda messed up my dates. So I had to pack up all my stuff and check in to a new apartment for a night. In doing so I left my razor and body wash in the first apartment and I now haven’t had a shave in four days.
Myself, John and my Mum went up to the boat on Sunday. It wasn’t a very pleasant day as you can see from my wet hair, and the wind was rubbish to begin with but we had fun nonetheless.
The picture above is me clipped into the spinnaker halyard hanging off the side of the boat. That is what spinnaker halyards are there for right?
The wind picked up a bit later but whilst it was still relatively calm the three of us worked out how to fly the spinnaker, which is something none of us had done before. It took quite a lot of messing around but we finally got it up even though we did kinda do it a little wrong as I now think the spinnaker bag should have gone up the mast. Tis but a technicality that I have to discuss with Keith. Below is a happy me with the spinnaker full of wind. It’s a real pity that we couldn’t have got a picture from the shore as it would have looked very impressive.
After working out how to fly the spinnaker we decided to do another downwind run which meant we only got off the water at about 5.30 or 6pm. It was quite a long day, so much so that Mummy Steele had to have a snooze on Monday whilst Amelia was in bed. The famous Steele siesta.