The forecast was for very light winds so we spent hours pouring over several wind forecasting apps to work out the best route.

Complete waste of time. We tried for a couple of hours but there was no way we were going to make it back to base so we gave up and used the engine.

This boat is a fairly modern 41ft Jeanneau and does about 7 knots under engine. Something of a contrast to some of the boats we had a few years ago (see day 3 2012)

We stopped for lunch at a place called the Blue Caves, passing the Green Caves on the way. These are on an island called Kolcep quite close to Dubrovnik so there are loads of day boats.

Here are the Green Caves

Hard to see the caves but if you zoom in you can see at least 6 boats anchored there. We motored on to the Blue Caves.

You have to be slightly mad to try and anchor in against the rocks amongst that many boats but we got in there with one other yacht.

Great snorkelling in the caves.

Just time to come back the long way round to take in a view of the old town before heading into the marina.

This may beat even last night for the most awesome place to put a bar.

Also spotted this on the way round

Looks like the guy who designed UEA did some work out here as well.

The charter company have 30 boats to get into a very confined Marina in the space of a couple of hours so it gets a touch busy. We managed to avoid all the many, varied and expensive options for messing up and get our boat into it’s space without incident beyond a bit of a debate with the refuelling station who couldn’t believe how little fuel we had used.

After everyone had enjoyed their first stationary shower in a week, we concluded that we had done harbour-side seafood restaurants, so we would take the opportunity to head into Dubrovnik’s old town. The taxis do more than 7 knots so it does not take long.

Absolutely stunning.

On a quest for a post-dinner ice cream we stumbled across an orchestra playing in a square. So unlikely though it may seem, to conclude, I leave you with the Dubrovnik symphony orchestra, Danjela Pintaric and 100 or so random tourists singing the anthem of the mooring rope.

The water really is that colour. We went for a snorkel to hang out with the fish.

After lunch at anchor, we had a slow sail to our destination for the evening back on Sipan Island.

Loads of small bays around here where there is some wildlife

And some wild life.

I wonder if we should get a yacht with a slide next year?

Anyway ahead of us here is our destination, Sipanska Luka.

We are on a mooring at the beach bar where the island is only about 10m wide.

They have booked us in for drinks at 6pm, so that we can watch the sunset.

You have to give them this one… a pretty spectacular location for a bar.

After another excellent dinner, some sampling of the local beers, and the interesting tender ride back to the boat in the dark, it seems that some of the wild life is moored near by….

The forecast today was for very little wind, sunny intervals and showers. The showers never showed up and we had 10 – 15 knots of wind all day.

Our planned destination was 14nm upwind of us, so we tacked up between Miljet island and the mainland covering 25nm in total.

Stunning views and a variety of passing traffic

It seems there are almost no free moorings in this part of Croatia. In Greece you usually can moor up on the town key for free and then choose a restaurant. Here, nearly all the moorings are owned by restaurants and you can use them for free as long as you eat in the restaurant. We’ve seen this system in other places but here it seems to only option. So in Polace there are 5 or 6 restaurants all with their own bit of quay so you have to decide where to eat before you moor…

Anyway tonight there is no organised stop and all the boats are at different places before we meet up again tomorrow night. We have booked ourselves in Konoba Barba in Prozura. A tiny little village.

We are moored to one of their buoys.

And as you can see it is not busy!

Just time for a swim and a shower before a cold beer and dinner.

They grill the fish outdoors on a fire here. I’m guessing anybody who ordered it last night was pretty unpopular.

Meanwhile… the cat didn’t say a word the whole evening.

The wind was officially classified as sporty gusting spicy. We sailed off downwind under just the genoa with Bernard having a whale of a time surfing behind us.

So the wind was fun, the problem was the thunderstorms, which at least held off for the time we were sailing.

No lunch stop today. As it was not sunny, we decided it was better to get in early, hide from the worst of the weather and explore our destination a bit.

Here are some pictures from previous days swimming.

I don’t recall seeing starfish before but there are loads of them around the area.

Anyway we arrived and were told where our allocated berth was and guess where we are?

Yep… next to the ferry. It left after an hour or two… not sure when it returns..

Anyway we are in Polace which is inside the Miljet national park.

There are lots of walking routes and mountain bike trails here. You can see from this map which also seems to serve as an outdoor youth centre for the locals. They kindly stopped throwing darts while I took the picture.

The park seems to have a range of ways of charging visitors money, including an entrance fee to the trails but there is a student discount so we sent some crew who could credibly claim those to get some pictures.

The thunderstorms turned up properly in the evening.

The lightning kept knocking out the power to the whole town, but the beer pumps in the restaurant don’t need electricity and the kitchen are obviously used to this because they managed to conjure up some excellent food.

Hopefully this storm will blow through overnight.

I wonder what time the first ferry is?

This one is a brute… must be doing 30 knots and goes from a small thing in the distance to several thousand tons of noisy steel really quickly

We were woken by another ferry (a car ferry) this morning as it docked next to our boat… this island is very lucky that the first ferry is at 6AM.

Just got back to sleep to be woken by a tapping noise at our cabin window.

We sailed a little further north in the same group of islands (the Elafiti islands) that we had spent the night in and found a great spot to anchor, quite a few other people had the same idea so it was a bit interesting finding a safe spot but we had a great swim and lunch.

If you want to know a bit about the Elafiti islands the restaurant we were in last night doubles as a tourist information point, so you can learn more of their dubious claims to fame here.

Tonight’s restaurant is in Okuklje on the Island of Mljet. The  pontoon is described as rustic….

This flotilla company like to lay on compulsory fun in the evenings and tonight’s activity is a tender rowing race. The person rowing has to be blindfolded and someone else has to navigate and tell them which way to go. Obviously, it would not have been fair on the others if I had taken part so we sent out some of the younger crew and Bernard. If you look closely you can see our tender facing the wrong way.. having Bernard navigate was probably a poor choice, but once one of the oar mountings broke this became academic…

Dinner in a brilliant restaurant inexplicably on the opposite side of the bay from their mooring pontoon.

But no ferries…

This one is a brute… must be doing 30 knots and goes from a small thing in the distance to several thousand tons of noisy steel really quickly

We were woken by another ferry (a car ferry) this morning as it docked next to our boat… this island is very lucky that the first ferry is at 6AM.

Just got back to sleep to be woken by a tapping noise at our cabin window.

We sailed a little further north in the same group of islands (the Elafiti islands) that we had spent the night in and found a great spot to anchor, quite a few other people had the same idea so it was a bit interesting finding a safe spot but we had a great swim and lunch.

If you want to know a bit about the Elafiti islands the restaurant we were in last night doubles as a tourist information point, so you can learn more of their dubious claims to fame here.

Tonight’s restaurant is in Okuklje on the Island of Mljet. The  pontoon is described as rustic….

This flotilla company like to lay on compulsory fun in the evenings and tonight’s activity is a tender rowing race. The person rowing has to be blindfolded and someone else has to navigate and tell them which way to go. Obviously, it would not have been fair on the others if I had taken part so we sent out some of the younger crew and Bernard. If you look closely you can see our tender facing the wrong way.. having Bernard navigate was probably a poor choice, but once one of the oar mountings broke this became academic…

Dinner in a brilliant restaurant inexplicably on the opposite side of the bay from their mooring pontoon.

But no ferries…

We made it to the marina without collecting any more travel anecdotes, a bit later than ideal but just enough time to get the boat sorted in time to go out and find some dinner.

Here is the boat… and I have no idea how I’m going to get it out of there either.

Found a great restaurant which had some cats hoping you would not finish everything…

This boat is with our group

But this one is not

You’ll notice the company we are with this time has tenders we can tow, which saves some hassle, and Bernard is particularly pleased about this.

15 miles of sailing in a nice breeze brings us to a small one restaurant town where we are moored up for the night.

And all in the restaurant.

Several runs on Vallon then over headed back over to Saulire, stopping briefly at the fun park

Then down the other side of Saulire to Signal for lunch.

There is a handy sign here in case you need to know.

Yet again the cloud built during the early afternoon, we were skiing down from Saulire into the cloud.

We decided to stop for coffee with the other beautiful people of Courchevel at the panoramic restaurant at the top of the Saulire cable car in the hope the cloud might clear.

Maybe we should stop here for lunch one day…

Then again… maybe not.

The visibility became impossible, so we headed down and took just one run in the Yeti Park near our apartment before returning our skis to the rental shop

Another attempt at Mont Vallon succeeded this time. Awesome snow but everyone had the same idea.

Over to VT to see if we can get a run down Cime de Caron. It turns out they broke one of the cable car cabins last year by crashing it into the lift station, so it is closed for the season. They don’t mention this in the three valleys app, they have just removed it from the list of lifts. So you look at the app for VT and it shows everything open… which it is not…

Luckily spotted a good old manual sign on a lift so we didn’t waste any time. Headed over to Orelle where the snow was really good and then got to the top of Caron on the bubble from that side (new in 2021). There is a brand new restaurant up here (the impressive structure on the left).

They must be pretty irritated because it is easy to access from the non working cable car and hard to access from the Orelle bubble so I imagine it is pretty quiet in there, probably wasn’t a cheap thing to build.

Anyway as you can see the weather was deteriorating so we headed down to one of VTs covered lunch huts (now with free WiFi.. I mean really?) and then back to Meribel while we could still see.

Not sure if this is a dinosaur or a dragon we spotted on the way back. Not sure that his tail was working well with chairlifts.

Decided to stop at the Tarte aux Pomme cafe for a coffee. It is only called Tarte aux Pomme by us, everyone else calls it La Sitelle. Apparently it has been run by the same family since 1984 but it is no longer a self and no longer sells Tarte aux Pomme. They do have waffles though

They keep the crowds down by being rude and generally unwelcoming to customers as they arrive. We somehow slipped through their defences and got a table mostly out of the snow.

Really heavy snow made skiing pretty horrible so we called it a day an hour early. Still skied over 55km though.

Arrived at the lift to find they had changed their mind and decided not to open it. Spoke to one of the operators who said they had measured 100kph winds so would try again later… it remained closed all day.

Oddly enough the forecast for VT was less wind so we thought we would head over but the wind on the tip was pretty fierce  were signs warning the links could close so we decided to stay in our own valley.

We found a good future lunch spot.. interesting table if there was no horizontal snow..

Stopped for a break in the afternoon at Le Arpasson cafe. This used to be a favourite years ago, then in turned into a loud music venue, the kind you can feel through the ground before you can see or hear, so we avoided it. This year it seems to be back to a ‘self’ with a nice covered bar area, playing Bruce Springsteen at a sensible volume.

The forecast was for it to brighten up and the wind to drop. Neither happened so we had a few more runs and headed for the apartment half an hour earlier than usual.

Let’s see if tomorrow resembles the forecast in any way.