The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘We hugged the coast as we sailed up the Adriatic’
Dalmatian ports from which Angelica can be chartered. Ivo was our captain. Six foot six in his deck shoes, he resembled a stretched version of Robert De Niro. Standing in the saloon-cum-wheelhouse, his head almost brushed the ceiling. In his right hand he gripped the wooden spoked wheel; his left hand was thrust into his shorts pocket. When he removed it, you knew the sea was about to get up.
He warned it would be windy on our two-hour voyage north to the island of Sipan, but said we would hug the coast. Ivo’s wife, Maja, moved a china bowl and a vase from the table all the same. I said we sailed: in fact, we motored.
Angelica carries sails but it takes an additional crew, as well as Ivo and his son, Nikola, to raise them, and then only on the foremast. To hoist the sail on the mainmast would mean dismantling the awning shading the aft deck, and that would never do because that was where we ate out, before snoozing on the big day bed on the stern.
Sipan is one of three inhabited Elaphiti Islands, an archipelago that could prove an invaluable answer on Pointless, the television game show. We anchored in the bay off the village of Sipanska Luka. Ahead was the spiky tower of the old village church; to the left the monstrous blockhouses of a villa development larded across a hillside. “It’s owned by a Russian,” a local explained. “He built the village sewage system in return.”
To the right, and almost the last building on that side of the bay, was Kod Marka, a tiny restaurant whose tables spilt out of the dining room on to a small stone quay. There was no menu but the owner had charm enough to persuade you that whatever he came up with was your own inspired choice all along. For us that meant a feast of seafood risotto, octopus fishcakes and a sea bass the size of a scuba fin, caught that day.
The next day Ivo took his hand out of his pocket. We crossed the Mljetski Channel on an irritable sea. Angelica went through a strenuous workout, shrugging and dipping, and sending the horizon racing up and down the saloon windows. Callisthenics over, we settled into our normal swaying gait, on course for Polace on the north shore of the island of Mljet. We approached between islets down a narrow channel. At water level a band of pallid rock ran around the coast like a skirting board beneath slopes of steep woodland. The village was typical – a cluster of small, four-square houses of ashen stone, windows tightly shuttered, tiles the colour of carrots.
Ferries call at these southern Dalmatian islands, and adventuresome yachts, as well as the occasional gulet. But tourism is too industrial a word for the kind of village hospitality that greets most visitors. If you are looking for unsullied Mediterranean, start here. These are the Greek islands 30 years ago.
It’s not as if they are without attraction, beginning with the lens-like clarity of their sea. The story of Mljet j is a sort of Twitter-feed of Adriatic h history. It’s where Calyps Calypso waylaid Odysseus for seven years, and is supposed to be b the island of Melita on wh which St Paul was sh shipwrecked, although Malta makes a similar claim. St Paul was bitten by a viper, which could c certainly be true. Mljet was once infested with s snakes until about 100 years ago, mongooses were introduced from In India. They put paid to the snakes – then went on to decim decimate the local bird populat population. The islan island was a retreat for wealthy Romans: at Polace we landed in front of the remains of a fifth-century Roman palace. But the most significant inhabitants were Italian Benedictines who occupied Mljet for almost seven centuries before they were kicked out by Napoleon in 1808. Almost half of the island is still owned by the church.
I know that from one of those fortuitous encounters that travel sometimes contrives. I had walked through woods of holm oak and Aleppo pine to the shores of Veliko Jezero, one of two saltwater lakes in the national park that covers most of the island’s north. In the middle of the lake is a 12th-century monastery. A ferry runs in summer.
By the time I reached the lake shore it was raining. A small motor boat, not the ferry, had just left the jetty. Spotting me, the boatman turned back. He had a single passenger – Igor Trogrlic, a conservator in charge of restoring the monastery’s Romanesque church. Serendipity.
Returning from the monastery, we lunched on board. Angelica’s chef produced meals quite as good as those of the village restaurants at which we ate. Triton was one at which we tied up for a dinner of squid fish cakes, calamari and grouper they call skrpina, or scorpionfish. In Croatia the pleasures of the table are hallowed.
Triton was in the village of Zaklopatica on the remote Lastovo islands, 44 blobs of land, all of them national park. The World Wide Fund for Nature has identified them as “one of the last 10 treasures of biodiversity left in the Mediterranean Sea”.
In the Cold War Lastovo was a Yugoslav navy base closed to foreigners. There are three small settlements, and a single hotel worth the name. Today’s population of 700 is less than half of what it was when the military was there. All that is left of those days is a small weather station, a warren of abandoned tunnels and some old gun emplacements pointing wistfully at Italy.
We walked through the village of Lastovo, a hillside of stone houses and cobbled steps. Admittedly it was early in the season, but even the locals had yet to emerge, never mind tourists. Near the church, whose nave is 15th-century, were two surviving fumari, tall stone chimneys that were status symbols for the grandest homes. They look like 600-year-old ballistic missiles.
The following day we would arrive at Korcula and tie up beside the yacht with the smoky hull. Breakfast in the sunshine would be all we had in common. I couldn’t help thinking that a superyacht would have looked as incongruous among the Elaphiti Islands as we would berthed in the Antigua Yacht Club. There are horses for courses and vessels for voyages.
Peter Hughes was a guest of Sail Dalmatia (0800 124 4176; saildalmatia.com) which offers cruise holidays aboard a range of boats including the 10-person gulet, Angelica. A week’s charter costs from €12,000 per week (approx £1,060 per person). A half-board package excluding alcoholic drinks costs €300. Allow extra for mooring fees and port taxes.