Thursday afternoon

We didn’t get the promised Mistral yesterday.  Almost no wind at all in fact.  We ended up motoring to Mljet which was fine but not particularly fun.  We moored uneventfully and had a nice time wandering around and exploring the ‘town’. (It’s about 20 buildings surrounding the port).  There is the ruin of an old Roman villa though which is pretty cool.

We used the mooring ball from a restaurant again so that made the choice of where to eat dinner very easy.  As we approached the restaurant we could hear  male voices singing.  The owner and two friends spent over an hour singing songs together.  Not particularly entertainment, they just enjoy singing.  It was lovely.

This morning we got up and took the bus across the island to the ‘lakes’.  There are two bodies of water in the middle of the island – one large and one small.  They call them lakes but they connect to the sea and have salt water.  In the larger lake is a small island.  We took the ferry to the island and explored.  There is a beautiful old church (restored) and the cloister for a monastery (working on it).  It was so amazingly peaceful and quiet there that I can see the attraction of becoming a monk!

After that we went over to the small lake and went swimming.  The water was substantially warmer than the ocean and the bay where we are moored. Very, very nice.  We ended up walking back to town because there was quite a line for the bus.  About 3 kilometers of walking on a beautiful path that cut through a mountain pass to get from one side of the island to the other.

Now we are relaxing and will go in to dinner later this evening. Tomorrow we need to start heading back to Dubrovnik but we will take a different route than the one we took to get here so we can see different places.

Random Thoughts

The water here is amazingly clear. And the color is the blue of pool water.  I don’t know what causes that.  What surprises me is how few fish that I see.  Clearly the fishermen here make a living catching fish so I don’t understand why in this very clear water I see fewer fish than anywhere else I have sailed.  Need to find out more about that.

We are also disturbed about the amount of junk that is floating in the Adriatic.  The ports seem clean (why?) but we ran into a tremendous amount of junk while sailing between the larger islands.  It seems to accumulate on the line between where there was wind and there was no wind.  Perhaps that is why it is there ?  But why so much?  Perhaps because this is up toward the middle of the Adriatic and stuff from lower down gets pushed up here ?  Would it be worse further north ?

Europeans have much fewer rules.  They seem to expect you to use common sense about things.  This is a national park and we were allowed (encouraged) to swim in the lake.  The only rule: don’t get back on the bus or the ferry wet. There were no rules about safety, no life guards, no warnings about rocks or diving where it was shallow.  It’s nice to be treated like an adult.