Long, lovely sail

Friday afternoon

Finally the Mistral Wind!  We had a lovely sail down the west side of Mljet Island.  There is a cave on this side that the locals say is where Ulysses was kidnapped by a local goddess.  He stayed here 12 years and fathered 2 children before he needed to leave and return to his wife.  I can see how a sailor who landed on this island would feel the urge to stay.  It is really lovely here – at least in the summer. 

Islands are very confusing to navigate.  I am very glad that we have gps and good nav charts.  I think that if someone were to come to these shores without those things, it would be easy to be lost and very hard to find a specific island or specific town.

I like the very poetic nautical terms: opening the bay, sinking the land.  Could any sailor really not know that the world is round ?

The land in Croatia in general is very stark.  High hills on the islands and the part of the mainland that we have seen has steep hills quickly rising to mountains.  The living here must be difficult.  Many fishing villages but I wonder what they do in the mountains ?  These mountains look ‘young’.  Not a lot of dirt on them so there is not a lot of greenery on most.  I haven’t seen sheep and goats the way we did in Greece. Tons of cats, though!  They all seem to be about the same age which is very odd.  The ones in Dubrovnik looked cared for and healthy (but thin).  The ones one the islands look like strays with evidence of fights and illnesses.  But not a single pregnant cat.  And we have seen only one dog – which was tied up in the bar at first and then later the owner took him for a walk around the town.

We arrived here and picked up a mooring ball with no great difficulty except that it is closer to shore than I like.  We are getting pretty good at this even though it is a job that is best down with three peope.  One person needs to drive the boat (that is me)  One person does everything else (that is  Bill).  First he attaches a line to the bow and drops it into the water. Then he gets in the dingy and rows to the mooring ball. I drive the boat as close to the mooring ball as I can without running him over.  He retrieves the line from the sailboat, threads it through the mooring ball. Then he stands up in the dinghy to tie the other end of the line to the bow again.  We have done this successfully several times but it would be much easier to have a third person up in the bow who can throw the line to him and tie on the other end after Bill has attached it to the mooring ball.

We had a nice swim in our very small bay.  This is the first place we have seen sand on the beach.  The water is quite warm close in to short but there is a shoal of rocks and beyond that the water gets deeper very quickly – and colder, of course.

Another sailboat that came in ran into grief while trying to pick up a mooring ball.  The mooring balls are very close to shore and they drifted over the rocky shoal.  The boat got stuck between one rock and another – when they tried to go forward, they would hit one and when they went back they would hit the other.  A couple of young guys on the shore jumped into a motor boat to help them out of the jam.

Tomorrow we head back to Dubrovnik.  I hope we have another good sailing day.