In sailing, women are taking more than a seat

The all-female Team SCA, of which the British sailor Sam Davies was the skipper, during the Cape Town Practice Race of the Volvo Ocean Race 2014-15.

Credit... Ainhoa Sanchez/Volvo Ocean Race, via Getty Images

From NYTimes by David Schmidt

They have waited years to earn respect, but now they are winning races and skippering and owning boats.

Competitive sailing has long been an old-boys’ club, yet over the past several decades, women have not only been joining the sport, they have also sometimes been taking charge of it.
They have become senior executives of sailing organizations and yacht clubs, and skippers and owners of boats.

For the first time, in 2018, a female skipper won an around-the-world race, one of the most grueling events in any sport, and five all-women’s teams have completed the round-the-world Volvo Ocean Race (now called just the Ocean Race).
The last American sailor to win an Olympic gold medal was a woman, in 2008, and women have also hoisted the America’s Cup.

Dawn Riley did that in 1992, and she now leads one of the pre-eminent high-performance sailing training centers in the United States.
Cory Sertl is president of US Sailing, the national governing body, and vice president of World Sailing, the international governing body.
And Lindsey Duda Coe was one of the winners of the Chicago Yacht Club’s 2019 Race to Mackinac on the boat she owns.

“Women athletes have been participating in Olympic sailing since 1988,” Sertl said.
“So, there are now more women who have experienced sailing at the highest level, and a number of these women have been drawn into being officials and leaders in the sport.”

Anna Tunnicliffe Tobias of the United States, competing at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, where she won a gold medal.Credit...

Clive Mason/Getty Images

Pamela Healy, a bronze medalist at the 1992 Summer Olympics, said having female leaders was vital.

“There was a Harvard Business Review study on boardroom dynamics that showed that corporations are more successful when they have at least three women voting members on their board of directors,” she said.
“Women add a diverse perspective that is invaluable to decision making and problem solving.”

In addition to winning countless races, Healy has served on the boards of directors of the St.
Francis Yacht Club and the San Francisco Yacht Club and is the president of the St.
Francis Sailing Foundation.
“I feel respected,” she said.
“I don’t feel that I’m a token.”

Still, she sees opportunities for improvement.
“It’s important to see photos of women in blazers on the wall, so women feel represented,” Healy said, referring to yacht-club leadership.
“And we need to improve boat ownership. That will equate to true equality.”

Some gender accomplishments have been hard-won.
Riley said she once discovered that a male crew member with similar duties and experience was being paid twice as much as she was.

“I’m pretty happy with where I’ve gotten,” said Riley, who later served as team captain of the mostly female America’s Cup team­ Mighty Mary.
“But my path was decidedly different than if I was male.”

Sertl, who was a member of the 1988 United States Olympic Sailing Team, said sailing was still evolving.

“I feel really fortunate in the U.S. to have tremendous support from men and women,” she said of her position at US Sailing.
“But World Sailing is different and changing.”

For example, five years ago, Sertl made a motion at a meeting of World Sailing to have gender equity in classes of boats and in the number of medals and athletes at future Olympics.
At that time, there were more sailing events for men than for women.
“Three men in the room objected,” she said.

While women have competed for sailing medals since the 1988 Summer Olympics, and the International Olympic Committee is mandating a push for gender equality, Sertl wants to see more female coaches who can serve as role models for aspiring female Olympic athletes.
“Many female athletes coming up haven’t had a high-performance female sailing coach,” she said

Sam Davies is one of the most accomplished offshore sailors in the world, male or female, and has competed three times in the Vendée Globe, the solo around-the-world race.
Far more people have reached the summit of Mount Everest than have completed the Vendée Globe, which takes about 80 days to finish.

“I think that some of the hardest challenges I face are not because I’m a woman skipper, but because what I do is hard,” said Davies, who has also skippered the all-women’s Team SCA in the 2014-15 fully crewed Volvo Ocean Race.

But she also said that women had a possible advantage in her sport: sponsorships.

“It’s maybe easier if you’re a good woman skipper,” she said of the Vendée Globe.
“Women can bring a good return on investment for a sponsor, because we’re a minority in a male-dominated sport.”

But finding sponsorship and acquiring the right boat are different matters.
Of the 30 boats that were on the starting line of the 2020-21 Vendée Globe, five were skippered by women.
Eight were new designs, all skippered by men.
“What’s missing is a sponsor who will give a boat that’s capable of winning to a female skipper,” Davies said.

The skipper Wendy Tuck, winner of the 2017-18 Clipper Round the World Race.Credit...Miguel Rojo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

So far, Wendy Tuck is the only female skipper to have won an around-the-world race.

“When I started skippering, I didn’t realize there wasn’t one,” said Tuck, who won the 2017-18 Clipper Round the World Race.
Unlike the professional crews of the Ocean Race, Clipper crew members pay to race aboard identical boats under the tutelage of experienced skippers like Tuck.
While this may lower the race’s level of competition, it increases the skipper’s leadership challenges.
“My crews varied, but they were roughly 30 to 40 percent women,” Tuck said.
“I’ve been on non-Clipper trips where the men say that they like having females aboard, because it changes the dynamics.”

Although the number of women who are skippers has been growing, they are still outnumbered by men, which can hurt confidence.

“A lot of women still believe that men are more capable than women,” said Kristina Plattner, who is skipper of the TP52 Phoenix 12, which she races on the 52 Super Series circuit.
“But it’s not true, especially for helming a yacht.”

Which is why role models are critical.
“I really hope that other girls can see women out there driving,” said Duda Coe, owner of the Santa Cruz 52 Sin Duda.
She admitted that being a female skipper was sometimes a struggle.
“Even on a boat I own, I’ve been intimidated by guys,” she said.

The gender disparity, she added, is part cultural and part physiological.
“Body size and strength are important,” Duda Coe said, but they are not the whole picture.

Anna Tunnicliffe Tobias after her gold medal victory in the Laser Radial class event in Beijing.

Credit... Clive Mason/Getty Images

Anna Tunnicliffe Tobias, who won the last United States sailing Olympic gold medal, said the importance of those factors depended on the task.

“I’m fairly fit, I think, but I cannot put out the wattage on the winches that some of the guys put out for 10 to 20 minutes, just because I don’t have the weight or height to put behind it,” she said.
“However, there are many other positions that I can do in the back of the boat, like drive, call tactics and navigate.”

Still, Tunnicliffe Tobias, who is also an elite-level CrossFit athlete, acknowledged that Grand Prix sailing is highly competitive.
“At the elite level, there are only so many spots available,” she said.
“I was once told, ‘If you want a spot on the boat, earn it’. It resonated well with me.”

More women are getting the opportunity to earn their spots aboard the most sophisticated boats because of efforts like SailGP’s mandate that teams have at least one female sailor.
Other Grand Prix events, such as the Ocean Race, offer incentives, like having a larger crew, to teams that race with female sailors.

So while women have made great strides in sailing, Riley isn’t content.
“When you shatter the glass ceiling, it’s not the first woman, it’s the third,” she said.
“That’s when you start to get equity.”

Maritime infographic: The fall of the mighty Titanic

 From MaritimeCyprus

The above infographic represents the best estimations science and history can currently make as to what happened in the moments immediately before and after the Titanic disappeared beneath the surface.

 

Links :

• Safety4Sea : Remembering Titanic: The tragedy behind SOLAS 

Ocean crossing in an outboard boat: The Al Grover story

Al Grover and his sons squared off against a monstrous hurricane, a near-drowning, fuel-issues and exhaustion on their way to earning a Guinness World Record for being the first outboard-powered boat to cross the Atlantic.

Man and machine vs. the ocean. Join us as we visit Grover in his home in Freeport, NY to hear his incredible story firsthand.

Oceans' extreme depths measured in precise detail

From BBC by Jonathan Amos

Scientists say we now have the most precise information yet on the deepest points in each of Earth's five oceans.

The key locations where the seafloor bottoms out in the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic and Southern oceans were mapped by the Five Deeps Expedition.
Some of these places, such as the 10,924m-deep (6.8 miles) Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, had already been surveyed several times.

But the Five Deeps project removed a number of remaining uncertainties.

For example, in the Indian Ocean, there were two competing claims for the deepest point - a section of the Java Trench just off the coast of Indonesia; and a fracture zone to the southwest of Australia.

The rigorous measurement techniques employed by the Five Deeps team confirmed Java to be the winner, but this lowest section in the trench - at a depth of 7,187m - is actually 387km from where previous data had suggested the deepest point might be.

Likewise, in the Southern Ocean, there is now a new place we must consider that region's deepest point. It's a depression called Factorian Deep at the far southern end of the South Sandwich Trench. It lies 7,432m down.

There is a location in the same trench, just to the north, that's deeper still (Meteor Deep at 8,265m) but it's technically in the Atlantic Ocean.

The dividing line with the Southern Ocean starts at 60 degrees South latitude.

Mariana Trench: Deep ocean trenches occur where Earth's tectonic plates meet 

image copyright Atlantic Productions for Discovery Channel

All of the new bathymetry (depth data) is contained in a paper published in the Geoscience Data Journal.
Its lead author is Cassie Bongiovanni from Caladan Oceanic LLC, the company that helped organise the Five Deeps Expedition, which had as its figurehead the Texan financier and adventurer Victor Vescovo.
media caption

 

Dr Heather Stewart: "We found over 100 new seamounts in the South Sandwich Trench"

The former US Navy reservist wanted to become the first person in history to dive to the lowest points in all five oceans and achieved this goal when he reached a spot known as the Molloy Hole (5,551m) in the Arctic on 24 August, 2019.

But in parallel to Mr Vescovo setting dive records in his submarine, the Limiting Factor, his science team were taking an unprecedented number of measurements of the temperature and salinity (saltiness) of the seawater at all levels down to the ocean floor.

This information was crucial in correcting the echo-sounder depth readings made from the hull of the sub's support ship, the Pressure Drop.

The reported depths therefore have high confidence, even if they come with uncertainties of plus or minus 15m.

In this context, refining the observations any further will be extremely hard.

The wider context here is the quest to get better mapping data of the seabed in general. Current knowledge is woeful.

Roughly 80% of the global ocean floor remains to be surveyed to the modern standard delivered by the likes of the Five Deeps Expedition.

"Over the course of 10 months, as we visited these five locations, we mapped an area the size of continental France. But within that was an area the size of Finland that was totally new, where the seafloor had never been seen before," explained team-member Dr Heather Stewart from the British Geological Survey.

"It just shows what can be done, what still needs to be done. And the Pressure Drop continues to work, so we are gathering more and more data," she told BBC News.

Factorian Deep is at 60.4 degrees South, and therefore just in the Southern Ocean

All of this information is being handed over to the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, which aims to compile, from various data sources, a full-ocean depth map by the end of the decade.

It would be a critical resource.

Better seafloor maps are needed for a host of reasons.
They are essential for navigation, of course, and for laying underwater cables and pipelines.

They are also important for fisheries management and conservation, because it is around the underwater mountains that wildlife tends to congregate.

Each seamount is a biodiversity hotspot.

In addition, the rugged seafloor influences the behaviour of ocean currents and the vertical mixing of water.

This is information required to improve the models that forecast future climate change - because it is the oceans that play a pivotal role in moving heat around the planet. 

Victor Vescovo spoke to the BBC on completion of his historic five dives

And if you want to understand precisely how sea-levels will rise in different parts of the world, good ocean-floor maps are a must.

The BBC made contact at the weekend with the Pressure Drop, which is currently sailing west of Australia in the Indian Ocean.

Team-member and co-author on the new paper, Prof Alan Jamieson, is still aboard.

He said the research ship was making discoveries every time it sent instrumentation into the deep.

"For example, there are some major animal groups in the world for which we just don't know how deep they go. Just last month, we recorded a jellyfish 1,000m deeper than 9,000m, which was the previous record by us. So we've now got jellyfish down to 10,000m.
"Three weeks ago, we saw a squid at 6,500m. A squid at that depth! How did we not know this? And during the Five Deeps Expedition, we added 2,000m on the depth range for an octopus.
"These are not obscure animals; it's not like they're some sort of rare species. These are big animal groups that are clearly occupying much larger parts of the world than we thought," Prof Jamieson said.

 

Prof Jamieson's team profiled water temperature and salinity at all depths

image copyright FIVEDEEPS.COM

The deepest place in the Atlantic is in the Puerto Rico Trench, a place called Brownson Deep at 8,378m. The expedition also confirmed the second deepest location in the Pacific, behind the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.

This runner-up is the Horizon Deep in the Tonga Trench with a depth of 10,816m.

 

Links :

• BBC : Submarine dives to deepest-known shipwreck /  World's deepest octopus captured on camera /  Adventurer reaches deepest ocean locations
• BGS : Deepest points of the Indian Ocean and Southern Ocean revealed

Cruising charter to Croatia

A fellow cruiser at anchor in the harbor at Vis

From SailMagazine by Eric Vohr (Photos by Michaela Urban)

As is the case with so much of the Mediterranean, to sail in Croatia is to take a journey through time.
Centuries before the birth of Christ, Greeks traded amphoras of oil, wine and grain across these waters.
During the first millennium, the Romans built lavish palaces and fortresses here.
More recently, the islands of the Adriatic have been home to secret WWII airbases and Cold War military installations.

 

ENC rasterised nautical charts in the GeoGarage platform

 

Eager to explore these ancient mysteries and bask in the region’s cerulean blue waters, quaint stone villages and lush green groves of olive and pomegranate, my partner, Michaela, and I set sail one fall to tour the many islands that lie off the coast of Split.

There's nothing like warm water and a fair breeze on charter !

 

We chartered with Sail Croatia (sail-croatia.com) in the ACI Marina in Split, which provided us with a fully-loaded, Beneteau Oceanis 41.
Before heading out, we did our homework, especially with regard to the variable winds in this part of the world, each of which has its own name—Bura, Jugo, Maestral, Levant, Tramontana, Oštro, Lebić and Pulenat.

We needed to be particularly aware of the northeast Bura and the southeast Jugo, both of which can be especially strong in fall and winter.
The Bura has been clocked at 150 knots, equal to a Category 5 hurricane, and even the less-intense Jugo can sometimes dish out 50-knot winds and 15ft seas.
If ever one of these winds is forecast, seek shelter, preferably in a marina.
Luckily, Sail Croatia provided us with a very thorough briefing and free Wi-Fi onboard, allowing us to get up-to-date weather reports around the clock.

Diving a 2,000-year-old wreck near Vis

 

We also made sure to plot our overnights well in advance and even pre-book in any especially popular destinations.
Coastal Croatia can get pretty busy, and with the steep shorelines you encounter there, we knew we wouldn’t find even half as many places to drop a hook as in the Caribbean.
Luckily, there are quite a few mooring balls scattered, and given we would be chartering during the off-season, we figured we’d be alright, as long as we didn’t arrive at any of our destinations too late.

Our first destination, Vis, is roughly 30 miles from Split, which is doable, but a long sail.
So we decided to break it up and stop in at a wonderful little bay on the eastern end of Solta island called Uvala Sesula.
It’s an easy 11 miles from the base and provides good shelter in most weather conditions.
There are also two great restaurants there that have mooring balls we could reserve in advance for free with a dinner reservation, a common routine in Croatia.

A closeup of a gunboat tunnel

Our first day out was an easy one with an 8 to 12-knot breeze on the beam that took us right to the mouth of the bay.
As we made our approach, we radioed in and one of the staff at Konoba Sesula came out to help us secure our boat.
(“Konoba” is the local term for a restaurant that serves traditional food.) Afterward, we took a narrow foot path over to the quaint fishing village of Maslinica, which has a lovely little harbor, more restaurants and cafés, and a number of grocery stores for last-minute provisioning.

The following morning the wind clocked a little south and then steadily increased throughout the day, providing a rather spirited close-reach and getting us into the lovely main port of Vis by early afternoon.
The town of Vis, which borrows its name from the island, is on the northern side of the island.
There is a large mooring field and a number of marinas that were all pretty empty when we arrived, but filled up considerably by sundown.

Due to its strategic position, Vis played a key role during both WWII and the Cold War.
In the 1940s, it was the site of a crucial emergency airbase for crippled Allied bombers.
In the 1980s, Yugoslav leader Josip “Tito” Broz built a pair of clandestine military bases both here and in neighboring island of Lastovo.

 

On our first full day on Vis we planned to explore the remains of a few of these military sites.
But while shopping for a scooter rental, we learned that many of them are poorly marked and therefore hard to find.
We were then directed to the local tour company Alternatura, run by Pino Vojkovic, who apparently was the “go-to guy” for military tours of the island.

The following morning we climbed aboard one of Pino’s signature blue Land Rovers and drove to a high vantage point where our guide, Goran, pointed out the ghost-like remnants of the now completely overgrown airstrip Allied bombers once made their emergency landings.
We also toured a small shop that now serves as a kind of de facto museum of ancient bomber wings, propellers, parachutes and other odd parts left behind by the Allies.

From there we drove to Cape Stupišće, where Goran took us down an impossibly rutted dirt road leading to a large clearing hidden by rotted camouflage netting.
Goran explained that this is where Tito hid the enormous trucks that served as both transport vehicles and launching platforms for his country’s Soviet-made, surface-to-air missiles.
He then handed us helmets and headlamps, and we entered the eerie darkness of one of the tunnels used to store these kinds of missiles.
Inside we found bunkers with foot-thick steel doors on greased hinges and explored narrow escape routes that terminated in small rock shelters disguised to look like shepherd outposts.
It was all like something out of a James Bond movie.

After that came ARK Vela Glava the headquarters for Tito’s operations in Vis and the island’s largest network of tunnels.
These tunnels were much darker and deeper and led to a network of side tunnels and rooms that once housed troop barracks and ammunition stores.
At the end of one of these tunnels we exited into the blinding sun only to find a decrepit gun battery aimed directly across the Adriatic in the direction of Italy.

Of course, the rich history of Vis is not only found on land, and our next stop was the local dive company, Nautica Vis Diving Center.
On one of our dives we got up close and personal with a U.S.
bomber that had sunk during the war.
Apparently, the now coral-encrusted B-24 had been circling the island trying to get its landing gear down when it ran out of fuel.
As the story goes, the captain first let his crew bail out before attempting a crash landing, a heroic maneuver he tragically didn’t survive.

Another dive took us to the wreck of an ancient trading vessel that pre-dates Christ.
Nothing was left of the actual ship.
But a large assortment of amphoras remains, many of them intact and presumably still full of their ancient cargo.

On our last day on the island, we took a relaxed scooter ride along Vis’s rock-strewn landscape dotted with wild rosemary bushes and chicory, thistle and rockrose flowers.
One of our stops, Komiža, the island’s other port town on the opposite side, has a wonderful selection of outdoor cafes along its historic harbor front.
We also explored a site called the Queen's Cave, near the abandoned village of Okijunca.
The trail there is poorly marked, so if you don’t like getting lost, you might want to hire a guide to take you there.
Okijunca itself makes for fantastic exploring with its small Capella and empty stone houses overlooking dark-green olive groves and the expansive sapphire waters of the Adriatic.

Before moving on, we spent a night in Blue Lagoon, a sheltered harbor on the western shore of Budikovac Island just off the southeast corner of Vis.
This beautiful little anchorage provided a wonderful respite before the long sail to our next port-of-call, Lastovo.
There are plenty of mooring balls here, a nice beach and a friendly family-run restaurant.
Although the bay is popular with day cruises, it largely empties out at night.

Lastovo is about 40 mile southeast of Vis, and the scattering of beautiful islands off its eastern end creates a spectacular entryway.
One of Lastovo’s larger Cold War military bases is located in Jurjeva Bay—a well-sheltered anchorage on the nearby island of Prezxba.

Jurjeva Bay has a nice little beach and is surrounded by an assortment of abandoned buildings and guard towers.
Exploring on the southern side of the bay, we stumbled upon a small entrance in a rock face that led to another one of Tito’s extensive tunnel systems.

Carefully watching our step and avoiding the ghostly camel crickets (that looked even more monstrous by the light of our headlamps), we picked our way down a long dark corridor and eventually came to a large munitions area similar to what we’d seen at Cape Stupi.
We also found evidence of troop quarters—barracks, ventilation equipment, old generator stands and bathrooms.
It wasn’t until we exited that we saw the small sign prohibiting entrance, so explore at your own risk.

Having had our fill of damp, dark tunnels, we re-energized our bodies in the warm Croatian sun by scrambling up an unmarked trail leading south to yet another bay called Uvala Kremena.
Here we found one of the sea tunnels carved out of the mountain that Tito used for hiding his gunboats.
There are a number of these on Lastovo and Vis that yachties now like to use for overnight stays, although it was not clear to us whether doing so was 100 percent legal.

Satisfied with our rather extensive military tour, our next stop was the lively port of Zaklopatica, a wonderfully sheltered bay on Lastovo’s northern shore and the site of an equally wonderful marina and restaurant called the Konoba Triton, a popular sailors’ hangout.

In Zaklopatica I also had a chance to practice my docking skills in front of a good-sized crowd, an experience that was not for the faint of heart.
The process was essentially “Med mooring,” except instead of dropping an anchor before reversing, there was a set of permanent bow lines you retrieved via a messenger line.

Split

The following morning, we explored the small village of Lastovo, within easy walking distance of Zaklopatica.

The town sits in a protected valley facing inland away from the sea and includes a collection of beautiful old stone houses perched on terraced streets.

Due to a slump in the local economy, much of the town appeared to have been abandoned or in serious disrepair, stimulating my ever-present urge to sell it all and start a café or hotel in precisely this kind of peaceful corner of the world. 

 

 

The author prepares for one of the area’s notorious Buras

 

From Lastovo, we continued on to one of our favorite destinations of the entire trip, Fisherman’s House/Pension Tonci on Sveti Klement in the Pakleni Otoci Islands.
Located roughly 30 miles northwest of Lastovo on the western end Hvar, Fisherman’s House is run by the Matijević family and is the quintessential relaxed, bucolic Croatian island retreat, complete with its own vineyard and vegetable gardens.

In fact, we loved Fisherman’s House so much, we originally decided to spend our last couple of nights there, sunbathing and soaking in the relaxed life of the Adriatic.
However, nasty weather was approaching, which our host said would likely turn into a Bura, in which case our wonderful little bay on Sveti Klement would provide limited shelter at best.
He recommended we shift to a marina in Milna and the much better protected harbor on Brac.
Without hesitation, we called to book a slip.

The weather was relatively calm when we arrived there, but it was amazing how quickly the storm hit.
After securing our boat, I was ashore taking a leisurely stroll along the waterfront when a few paper bags and paper trash started spinning in circles around me.
I didn’t think much of it until a patrons in a nearby restaurant told me to take cover—fast—prompting me to make a bee-line back to our boat.
The storm hit minutes later with torrential rain and such violent winds some of the crews taking shelter in the harbor had to adjust lines to prevent their sterns quarters from hitting the pier.

Afterward, when the storm had passed, Milna’s many quaint restaurants, bars and clubs quickly came back to life.
Milna is a picture-postcard, classic Croatia seaside town, with its classic stone architecture and baroque church with a characteristic Dalmatian bell tower.
The surrounding countryside is equally enchanting, consisting of a patchwork of old stone farms and picturesque orchards.

Sadly, Milna represented the end of our charter.
It was also time to top up our fuel tanks, something we wanted to do while still out among the islands to avoid the long lines and general mayhem we’d seen at the fuel dock in Split.
Unfortunately, we ended up facing the same problem in Milna—boats drifting into each other, no real system or queue, plenty of screaming and short tempers.
I’m guessing the only way to avoid this kind of chaos is to fill up out on the islands late Thursday night or super early Friday morning.
Anyway, we survived.

Once safely back in the harbor of Split, we spent a few days exploring the city with its old Roman Palace and narrow alleys.
We stayed at Divota, a wonderful hotel that included some of the magnificently restored century-old stone houses in the ancient neighborhood.
If you prefer staying in the heart of the palace “compound,” as it’s called, the Marmot is nice as well.

For dinner, there are plenty of choices, but we particularly liked Articok, as the chef there is amazing.
Trattoria Tavulin is also located inside the palace “compound” and the outside seating there is nothing less than magical.
A place called Dujkin Dvor, along the waterfront, is an especially friendly local eatery where the owners regularly circulate among the guests, making it a great place to end your visit to this charming corner of the world.
Just be mindful of the weather and plan ahead.
You want to enjoy the history here, not become part of it! 

The town of Lastovo sits nestled among the hills

Cruising Tips: Croatia

May through June and late September to October are the best times to sail in Croatia.
The weather is great, you avoid the crazy summer crowds, and you’ll find great deals and availability of boats.
The winds in Croatia blow for all directions, at all times of the day and year, and can change quickly, both in direction and intensity.
Be prepared to find safe harbor, preferably a marina, during rough weather.
Mooring balls are the norm, as most of the bays have steep shorelines and rocky bottoms.
Overnight wind shifts are also common.
Most of the smaller coves and bays offer free moorings to those who book a dinner at one of the restaurants ashore.

Croatia is Europe’s most popular sailing destination, so expect crowds, even off-season, and plan accordingly.

It’s not necessary to load up on provisions beforehand, as we found well-stocked stores and bakeries at many of the destinations we visited.

Croatia depends heavily on tourism and sailors, and you’ll find great restaurants almost everywhere you go, so be sure and give them a try.

 

Links :

• GeoGarage blog :Bura wind in Croatia /Valentine Day / Soul sailing in Croatia / How many islands does Croatia have