Day 39 - Motorboatin’

Had a good sleep & woke fresh to take on a new challenge.

After breakfast, Ivo was loitering on the jetty waiting to give me a motorboat lesson. He was a pedantic instructor & made me have 5 or 6 attempts at bring the boat to a gradual standstill against the jetty. He was getting slightly frustrated at me, not helped by the language barrier, but eventually I was given the all clear to hit the high seas. Well, not quite, he gave me a map with the islands we could visit & with a line we should not cross.

We set off for the island of Otok Badija with it’s attractive church & monastery about half an hour away in our chugging boat. I identified a jetty to moor up at, then made a right pigs ear of actually getting the boat to come to rest where I wanted it to. Luckily no-one else was on the jetty.

We walked towards the monastery & saw a family feeding carrots to 2 deer with vicious looking antlers. The father turned his back on one of the deer who took exception & gored him in the back ripping a big hole in his T-shirt. “Come on Jackie, let’s go back to the boat”.

We eventually got the four stroke engine started & we circumnavigated Otok Badija anti-clockwise until we were virtually in open water on the main ferry route. It got remarkably choppy & I bottled it, so we turned round & retraced our wake.

We then circled a couple of small islands & thought about the possibility of a swim and/or swimming to shore. We dropped anchor and we decided that I should jump in first & see how easy it was to get back in. It wasn’t.

There were no steps on the boat & the sides were too high & slippery for me to pull myself up. Jackie tried to pull up but luckily we had both oiled up & couldn’t get a grip. After 10 minutes of trying, I gave up. Instead, Jackie pulled the anchor up & I swam ashore pulling the boat behind me. Eventually I got in shallow enough to climb aboard again. We are not sailors!

We ‘motorboated’ back to the jetty on Otok Badija and saw that it was now busy so we decided to just hold back until it was a bit quieter. In doing so we watched a similar boat to ours with 4 aboard ram into another boat as their means of stopping. The owner of the other boat witnessed this & remonstrated with them.

When everyone had dispersed, we made a textbook arrival, dropping the anchor & Jackie hopping on to the jetty with a rope as the boat gently glided in. I wish the crowds had been there to witness it.

Feeling smug, we set off on the 5km path around the entire island. It was shady & made for a very pleasant stroll. We then popped into the church & monastery before returning to our boat avoiding the group of 6 deer as we went.

Once back on the high sea Jackie took over the controls & seemed much more at ease than I felt. We headed to the Island of Vrnik & I completed another perfect docking. Vrnik was a tiny island with a collection of houses & a restaurant, Vrnik Arts Club. It was posh, too posh to have a menu or sell large beers, but by god was it the perfect setting for lunch. We had 4 small beers & shared a salad with barrata cheese. It was gorgeous, but it came at a price, about £25! All the other diners clearly had way too much money as they ordered bottles of chilled wines & lobsters & oysters probably costing hundreds of pounds.

In the afternoon we headed south & moored offshore near a beach called Bilin Zal. It would have been nice to have a swim, but instead we cooked on our gently rocking boat until 4.30pm.

As we approached our home jetty, I saw man stood on it with a camera on a tripod. It must be the Ukrainian. I got in all of a fluster of having an audience & forgot to drop anchor on our approach. The man shouted “Do you want me to help.” Jackie shouted, “No” & I shouted “Yes” simultaneously. The man shouted “I don’t know what to do!” He then put his foot out to stop us smashing into the jetty. I then had to embarrassingly reverse back to drop anchor & head back to the jetty for a second time. Again the man helped us prevent ramming the jetty. All very undignified.

Once we had come to a standstill, Ivo appeared & helped us off & then parked the boat properly. The man introduced himself to us as Sergei. He spoke very good English & was very likeable. We learnt that he lives in Dubai with his family, but has a Croatian farmer friend he likes to visit, but prefers to stay at Ivo’s. We had a long chat with him & he gave us some good tips regarding Covid tests & ferries. Jackie has a sneaky look in his fridge & it was full of bottles of spirits & water.

After a drink on our balcony, we went back to Konoba Marco Polo for dinner. I had macaroni with meat & Jackie had pork skewers. With a litre of wine & complimentary doughnuts & a glass of liqueur, it was still cheaper than lunch.

We returned to find Sergei comatose on his bed snoring loudly. We closed his door & had a quick nightcap of our own whilst watching the end of the cricket.

Song of the Day : The Boatman by The Levellers.Read more