Croatia - Island Hopping and Diving

sportbilly

Does anyone know any good diving schools around the Dubrovnik end of the country where you can do a PADI course?

Also after I do the course I'd like to spend 5 days or so knocking around the place. Any suggestions of where to go?

Culchie

Look at http://www.croatiaactive.com/

Miljet is an hour away from Dubrovnik or so .... (cough) ..if you need a place to stay, I should have my appartment ready for rent in June.

sportbilly

Thanks, I'll have to check Mijet out now.

Culchie

From the Sunday Times ...


How I learnt to luff with Ulysses
Andrew Thomas met dolphins, jellyfish and classical heroes on a sailing course in Croatia



I blame the dolphins. It was just at the moment when we should have been concen-trating hardest that they distracted us with their clever aquatic dance. If it hadn’t been for them, we’d have found the “legendary and beautiful” cave of Ulysses and been back at the hotel in time for dinner as planned. Instead — well into the night — we were sailing through the dark, I was nursing jellyfish wounds, Ray had almost drowned ... and five dolphins were entirely at fault.

I was aboard a 35ft yacht off the coast of the island of Mljet, in southern Croatia, and it was the third day of my crewing course. Croatia is being hyped as the new watersports mecca — more than 1,000 miles of coast, 1,189 islands, reliable winds and prices up to 20% lower than Greece — so it was the obvious place to give sailing a go.

Mljet could not have been a better base. The entire western end of this long, skinny island was designated a national park in 1960. Development has been kept to a minimum: there is one hotel, and its few coastal hamlets have the odd guesthouse and lobster restaurant, but the interior — a rock-fringed and hilly pine forest encircling twin salt-water lakes — is all but devoid of human touch. My immediate base was the village of Pomena (population: 37), where, in summer, the number of boats in the bay well exceeds the number of buildings on the land.

First morning, first theories. My instructor was Aco, a well-travelled and even better toned Adonis of a man with long blond hair and ladders of scars down either calf. Forget the water and concentrate on the wind, he explained. It wasn’t a laser beam; it wouldn’t always come at the same strength or from the same direction. But if I could learn to feel the breeze, understand and respect the wind, I’d be halfway to becoming a sailor.

On board, I soon appreciated the meaning of “shipshape”. Everything had a specific name, and every named thing its own specific place. The mainsail was held in place on the mast by the halyard, adjusted with the main sheet according to telltales. I needed to know when to bear away, luff up and — less technically, but more crucially — shut up. Winch handles belonged in that specific box, jib sheets were looped in this particular way, fenders tied with this precise knot.

The boat rigged, Aco, I and two other students were at sea for the first practical lesson. It takes three to sail these yachts, and Aco was determined to do no more than direct; there would be no passengers on board. That first morning, we stayed near to Pomena, learning to turn circles while tacking and jibing around a rocky offshore islet. I was at the helm, Ray manned the jib and Thomas played bowman. The boat was ours.

It took a while, but even over the course of that first morning, it began to come together, and so, as a crew, did we. Of course we’d flap, and soon the sails would too. But as we stopped flapping, so would they. At times, I’d push the tiller away too fast — a handbrake turn in a boat. At others, facing too much into wind, we wouldn’t turn at all. “You can’t change direction unless you’re already moving forward,” Aco explained.

It seemed like a metaphor for life.

The following day, we plumped for a target: the cave where, as part of his Odyssey, Ulysses is said to have sheltered for seven years. Armed with the simplest of maps and the crudest of instructions (“You can’t miss it”), we sailed off to track along the southern coast of the island. And quickly became becalmed.

It may sound perverse, but one of the most liberating things about sailing is that however practised you are, you can never control everything. If the wind’s light — and it happens, even in Croatia — you’re not going to move fast, and no amount of brainstorming or blue-sky thinking will change that fact. Aco did offer to turn on the motor, but, as his students, we weren’t having any of it: we were sailors now! So we bobbed along, examining every nook in a very craggy coast to a soundtrack of nautical percussion: splash, flap, creak; splash, creak, flap.

After four hours, somewhere below the hamlet of Ropa, the wind picked up. I spotted it first — a dark line of turbulent water, almost on the western horizon. It came slowly at us, like the ever-encroaching fin of an invisible shark: when it hit, we were off. “Broad reach, bear away” came the command, and I, on the main sheet, let the rope slip through my hand as the boat tilted and digits on the speedometer rolled — six knots, seven, then eight.

It might have felt fast, but for the dolphins that joined us, this was a recreational speed. Initially two to starboard, three to port, they quickly regrouped in formation; a couple on either side as the fifth nipped just in front of the bow, its tail fin towing us with lines of imaginary thread. On the left they breached, to the right they dived; now they were under the bow, now behind the stern.

“They’re leading us to the cave!” I exclaimed. But they weren’t. We were there to be flirted with, no more. Within 15 minutes they’d left us, off to find other dancing partners on the sparkling waters of the Adriatic.

The distraction of the dolphins, combined with our new-found speed, meant we were having immense difficulty finding the cave. The promise had been of a secluded cavern of limestone and dolomite, a covered grotto sheltered from the wind. But the direction “You can’t miss it” appeared to be something of a lie. You could. We did.

I thought I’d found it. Roughly where the map said it should be, I spotted a deep cleft in the cliff, a slim channel leading tantalisingly inside. Just off shore, we put our new skills to use; faced into the wind, dropped and tied the sails and lowered the anchor. A dive in, a quick swim, and we’d see the site of a legend. I couldn’t wait.

I wish I had. I never saw what actually got me, what delivered that searing double prong of pain. It felt like a stab wound, but even in my shocked state, I knew that few sea creatures carry knives. Jellyfish, on the other hand, sting.

The swim to shore felt like a long one, never knowing what was around me or where. But I made it, skin quietly bubbling, and — awaiting an allergic reaction that never came — pulled myself ashore. Choosing to look before he leapt from the boat, Ray joined me, and together we worked our way up the cleft to find a couple of rock pools, but nothing worthy of Homer’s hero. Disappointed, we made back for the boat.

Whether I swam back particularly swiftly because of my outbound adventures, I’m not sure, but while I made it easily, Ray struggled. Halfway back, indecision kicked in and he tried to turn back to shore. From where I stood on the stern, it quickly became clear he was in trouble. With the water choppy and high, he could do little more than tread it.

Good courses incorporate practical tests, and this was mine. Two days earlier, I’d learnt to make a loop with a bowknot, and now, as far as I was concerned, a man’s life depended on my ability to remember it. I began reciting my way of recalling the intri- cacies of the knot: “The rabbit comes out of the hole, goes around the tree, back down the hole... and pull.” It worked.

I threw. And missed. And pulled it in. And threw. Again.

If there’d been angels nearby, they’d have sung; mermaids would have danced a fishy dance. Ray caught the loop, slipped it over his shoulders and lay flat on his back, then Aco and I pulled him in and aboard. He was exhausted, but safe. The cave, to us at least, would remain Ulysses’s secret. We pointed the boat west, let wind fill the sails and followed the golden trail of the sunset home. All sailors have a tale; this was ours.



Andrew Thomas was a guest of the Croatia Tourist Board and Croatia Airlines