Author: Merro

We know we are lucky, not the least because our friends our travelers too.  This gives us great insight on what to see when visiting different places that they have visited, lived in or live nearby.

1)      So far, our best evening was spent with Monica Earl.  Nothing one can see in London, is as great as seeing a good friend from home.  It was great to hear about the work she is doing and life in London.

We had a quiet evening with a quick stroll around Canary Wharf, we saw the Temple Lounge, in West India Quay.  This is a Sheesha Garden, where people meet to smoke exotic scented tobaccos with water pipes and have drinks and socialize. We decided not to eat there but go to a nearby café.  We wouldn’t have even understood what a Sheesha Garden was except for Monica’s insider knowledge.

2)      Pam Lofthouse is studying in the UK and had given us two tips, both excellent. The first was to see Warhorse, which we were lucky enough to get to see. Excellent production, the horses are puppets but lifelike at the same time. Great theatre, highly enjoyable for both of us.*

3)      Pam’s better tip was to visit the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln Inn Fields.  Even with a description and a quick look on the internet, nothing prepared us for the home of this great English architect and his ‘house-museum’.  Imagine a terrace house, but with ceilings 25 ft high and every available inch covered in art and antiquities.  Mirrors were strategically placed to capture light and during Soane’s lifetime, his home was lit with whale’s oil which must have been a wonderful illuminant for these dark rooms. There is a Venetian room, filled with paintings of Venice by Canaletto.  He also has a series of paintings by Hogarth, including one series called An Election, which illustrates that politicians may change but politics doesn’t.  They are as wickedly funny now as in 1754.  Soane’s museum is superb and well worth a visit.*

4)      This trip to London was hastily devised not planned, so the only meeting we were going to get with Libby Chapman was a phone call to the Isle of Wight. Libby told us about the Wallace Collection.  We weren’t even sure if we could fit it in because we were going to the British Museum on Sunday.  Sunday was stormy and raining, so half of London was at the British Museum, we managed an hour before we decided that the Wallace Collection may be more hospitable.  The Wallace Collection is also a house-museum.  It is an incredibly large and diverse assembly of fine art, decorative art and armory.   There are so many Pre – French Revolution paintings of royalty and 19^th French paintings there in the Collection, that we heard more French than English.  In the armory area in the basement, even 14 year old males were engaged; as they could try on the armour, helmets and leather jerkins, then try to stand upright.*

5)      Shopping – enough said.

*No photos allowed in these venues

As many of you know, the weather in the Med has been very gray, wet and windy. We decided to come back to Dubrovnik early and leave Croatian sailing with a graceful exit. All the better to prepare Mercier for winter. So for you sailors out there, this will be the last blog.  We will still be posting a few pages about places we are travelling to and family events.

Last weekend, we cleaned, stowed and polished. All the laundry has to be done and put into vacuum bags. lifelines need a coat of WD 40, Sails and bimini put away on the last day of the Bora, so all incredibly dry. Each cabin, ceiling, walls and floors washed with vinegar and water to keep the damp at bay.  Yesterday, James went to check that everything was shipshape and say goodbye to Mercier’s caretaker.

We have moved into a small studio near the Ploce Gate in Dubrovnik.  So here are a few more photos of Dubrovnik in the rain including one of our favorite chill out bars. Visited by tourists, who have a coffee or a drink, a swim and read their papers or a book, while looking over to the island of Lokrum.

We walked the Bastion again, needed those stairs one more time and took a few photos of the amazing fortress city. We will play in Dubrovnik one more day and tomorrow fly out for a week in the UK, mainly near London.

Happy Birthday to Will Cuddy and  Jan Riley.  Harry Jenkins, your birthday is coming up too. Hope it is great.

Mljet is one island that we enjoyed so much, we took a second bite of the cherry.  We left Korcula on Sunday the 29th in a stiff head wind, messy seaway and grey sky.

We arrived at Polace and stayed at the very nice Calypso Restaurant – reminding us that some feel that Mljet was the home for the nymph Calypso in the Odyssey.  The drill here is you moor at a restaurant and you get a free mooring but you have to buy yourself a nice dinner.  We relaxed, just reading in the cockpit, when two very nice Americans, Candace and Dave came over from the gulet Krila 7 moored nearby.  They had been hiking up at the two lakes area of Mljet and had visited the Isle of Saint Mary.  Rain was threatening, so we decided to walk to the Roman ruins and go to the island the next morning.

Dave and Candace kindly asked us over for a drink before dinner and we met the rest of the Americans on board. The hospitality was warm and it was great meeting these genial travellers from both coasts of the US.

Morning takes us to the Two Lakes and the Monastery of Saint Mary,  on a bus from Polace and then a ferry across to the island that had been a Benedictine Monastery from 1151 until 1961.

We are able to see the church and walk around the entire island.  In one very tiny chapel is a beautiful, almost Oriental painting of Mary.  On the very small altar below were letters to Mary and God, thanking them for past help or asking for indulgence. It felt very human yet very modern to be writing letters to God.

We took the ferry back to the hiking trail near the small lake to Pomena and so we walked over stone by the lake and had lunch in Pomena.  After a very good lunch, we went into a shop for water for the 4 Kilometre hike back to Polace, Right in front of us was a bus which the waiter had said was non existent and we were back in Polace in a few minutes.

By the time we returned to Calypso for dinner, several other boats on a yachting flotilla had joined the quay.  It was the Austrian sailing division who had just arrived from Trogir and the races started the next day.  There was quite of a bit of Austrian music and Croatian beer, with drinking games played to The Sound of Music.  One Austrian gentleman, Norbert, came over to apologise for the noise  and explained that he once had a great vacation driving from Brisbane to Tamworth to the Hunter Valley and finally Sydney. Needless to say we enjoyed the Sound of Music and a few other Austrian Tunes to the wee small hours of 3 AM and then the bora arrived in earnest.  We bounced on the mooring until the next morning.  (We are telling you all about this because it is illustrative of the types of things that happen on Mercier that are out of the skipper’s control, not to create pity.)

We decide the next day to stay in Polace but to go over to anchor in a very sheltered spot because even on Calypso’s mooring we are bouncing as if we have St.Vitus dance. The result is immediate and we read and nap in our little cove. It is so calm.  We have dinner, then about 11PM, the bora comes in strongly and even in our sheltered little cove we bounce madly. For the second night in a row there is very little sleep and to add injury, it turns cold.

The Northeasterly bora seems to be a wind that gets quiet in the afternoon and blows up big in the dark of night.  We decide to brave the bora and motor sail for 12 miles to Okuklje.  It is bound to be protected from the bora and perhaps even quiet this time of year.

We feel we have made a good choice when we go into the small harbour. There are only a few yachts here. Well, it is October and there is a chill to the air.  We are at Maran’s Restaurant quay.  I feel terrible, for at six pm, we are the only yacht on their quay. Will they have to open their restaurant just for us?  Should we offer just to pay for the mooring?

The food isn’t nearly as important as the safe moorings that Maran is known for.  A quiet night, maybe even an early one, we would be happy with baked beans if we could just have a good night’s sleep.

We contemplated how we would broach the subject as the first of our intrepid Austrian friends sail into the protected harbour.  One has to feel the pain of the restauranteur – going from one boat and one couple for dinner to 15 yacht crews without prior warning.   The restaurant staff goes into full overdrive to cope with the huge influx, beers are poured, orders taken then a stroke of genius.  A young waiter turns on the TV, soccer soothes the savage beasts…sorry soothes the sailors.  Our friend Norbert comes and chats as we finish our tasty dinner.  The Austrians had battled the bora while racing and thought it better to change their plans to be closer to tomorrow’s marina.  They left early this morning, we toasted their valiant efforts with our tea (in bed).  It is chilly here in Croatia.

Happy Birthday to Libby Deegan, also to Ainsley and Fran, happy birthday to you both, since we are going to be packing sails and cleaning ropes we should get in early. Bon chance and Bon Voyage to Cameron, Anne and Florence who are moving to ChristChurch this week too.

Korcula lured us into its lovely marina although we planned on going to Lumbarda.  It was almost impossible to believe ACI Korcula was the same marina.  It is much quieter in late September and there is room to manuever.  Korcula town is also much easier to navigate in mid-September, there are still tour groups and cruise ships but it is definitely less crowded.

We decided to take the bus to Lumbarda in the morning and see if perhaps there was somewhere to have coffee.  Lumbarda is a smaller marina, with great vistas back to the islands off Korcula.  There is a lovely beach past the marina and we walk along til the end, visit the large Bistro Maestral for coffee and return to Korcula.

Walking around this old Venetian city fortress is wonderful, every corner gives you something intriguing to look at.  The views across to a bora denuded hill on the Pelasic peninsular illustrates the power of the north to northeast katabatic wind, which can blow up to 100 knots.

We were wandering down a street southeast of the marina, after shopping for supplies. We decided to walk to the end of a street to see if we could find steps to take us back to the marina.  We came across a Saturday afternoon activity for this time of year.  Here was a family making their own wine.It looked as if they had removed and mulched the stems, crushing them.  They added grapes to the press and then layered in the stems, more grapes and more stems. The grapes were in a press the size of a 44 gallon drum in the garage.

Autumn is bringing variable weather but much cooler, a very comfortable 27 degrees and cool nights for sleeping. We are starting to think about putting Mercier on the hard for the winter but we are hoping for a few more nights on the islands on our way back to Dubrovnik.

Our first night on Lastovo is in Luka Mali Lago, a very nice anchorage in a sheltered bay on the west side of Lastovo.  There are  a few cafes and an hotel in the next bay, which we can walk to or go under the bridge in the Zodiac.  There are a few houses on the shore and there are just three boats here overnight. We hear it can be very crowded in August.

We have a nice swim in the morning and motor for about 1 1/2 hours to Skrivena Luka.  As you approach Skrivena Luka, you can’t see the entrance to the bay at all.  I wonder why James is pointed directly at the island, but as you get closer you can see the narrow deep channel entrance and a completely landlocked harbour right underneath Pt Struga lighthouse.

Skrivena Luka means ‘hidden harbour’.  The Porto Rosso restaurant has a wonderful marina there, pay a small fee and have your dinner in the restaurant and everyone is happy. It is a very sheltered spot being landlocked and would have been another good place to be in the recent bora.

Mercier travels almost half way around the island to the tiny harbour of Zaklopatica.  It is like a small jewel and we are at the restaurant pontoon of Augusta Insula.  The names reminds me of Romans and it is very interesting to note that the Roman emperors came to Lastovo and built holiday homes. Augusta Insula means the ’emperor’s island’, the Roman name for Lastovo.

We order a Croatian Lamb Peka for dinner and walk up to the land locked town of Lastovo. This is a town of 15th and 16th century houses and churches.  All of this in a valley shaped in a natural amphitheatre.

The town’s icon and emblem are the ‘fumari’ or chimneys.  Each craftman built a slightly different chimney for each family home.  The fumari are all unique and range from the delicate to the almost phallic.

There can be a large church and it will be surrounded by several smaller ones dedicated to different saints. We were amazed at the number of churches in a very small area.

We walked back to the boat, partially on an old Roman road, which was more like a bush track. Back on the main road to Zaklopatica, we pass some very endearing graffitti.

On our second day in Vela Luka, wind warnings for the dreaded Bora came over the internet and it was also apparent by the large number of boats that were filing in all day.  Here we were in Korcula’s most protected harbour wearing T-shirts and shorts yet the weary sailors coming into the harbour were in wet weather gear.  We decided we would stay here on the comfortable town quay for the duration.