15 September 2017 – Prozura, Mljet Island

Our next place to see is the Dalmatian Islands.  The idea for today was to have a fairly leisurely morning and go to an anchorage about 15 miles away.  The alternative was another 50 mile motor trip, which we did not fancy.  We looked at the weather forecast last night and it showed settled weather with light winds and fairly flat seas until at least the weekend.

So we did that and set off just after 9am.  I was a little concerned when Richard was spending a lot of time at the chart table and couldn’t understand why we weren’t just following the plan.  Eventually (after about 2 hours) he told me that the up to date weather forecast that he just had showed strong winds over night and a force 5 to 6 tomorrow.  Therefore, the anchorage he had in mind originally was not going to be suitable.  He thought we might try another anchorage, but that was 30 miles away, a further 6 hours motoring.  I hadn’t prepared for such a long trip and the sea was lumpy and I wasn’t entirely comfortable.  Eventually Richard did identify a somewhat closer anchorage which sounded good.  So we headed for there, and arrived at about 2:30pm doing a bit of motor sailing.

The anchorage is actually very nice.  It is in a protected bay on the island of Mijet, which has a National Park at the other end.  Unfortunately we won’t get there this trip.  There are a lot of laid mooring buoys here.  According to the books some of them belong to two restaurants and you have to eat there if you want to use them.  We must use up some food tonight, so we want to eat on board.  The other buoys are supposed to be free, but the books are very vague about that.  Some say you have to pay, others say payment is illegally collected.  Anyway I managed to capture a buoy and attach us properly, with help from R.  The pick up was very odd.  Basically we had to pull the plastic buoy right up to the gunwales and attach our rope to it from there.  Well, we managed anyway.

Not entirely unexpectedly eventually a man turned up in a boat and demanded payment for using the buoy.  He said they belong to the harbour and so harbour dues are payable.  He asked for what was about just over £30.  We really couldn’t argue.  He gave us a formal receipt.  Heaven knows if we were conned.  Of course paying for a safe mooring, especially if a big wind is coming, is fine.  Just here the sums are a bit surprising.  But here we are hopefully nicely settled for the night.

It has been quite cool.  We were going to go swimming, but by the time we had a bite of lunch and a little rest the sun was going down and the water temperature was only 22C.  So we didn’t go in.


Richard has now made an outline plan of our journey to Venice.  If all goes to plan we will reach there by about 6 to 8 October.  But of course, weather may well get in the way.

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