Jacky Milnes

Our final day 😭. Every experienced Croatia sailor knows this means only one thing - getting to Milna petrol pump nice and early! We snook out of Bobovice first and arrived with only 4 boats ahead of us. I think everyone was amused at how you can’t just relax in a queue on a boat - it requires constant attention and occasionally a bit of dancing with other boats in tight spaces! Great docking by the whole team, we slowly drifted onto the pontoon and filled up both boats faster than I could eat my magnum ice cream! Getting off the pontoon though….oh dear, Lou at Nomad wouldn’t be impressed. I completely forgot how to spring off to get an angle (we had boats either end of us) and just found myself pinned onto the pontoon for a few minutes. In the end some confident reversing got us away cleanly…just. Lovely feeling seeing how small the fuel bill was for the week (€120 both boats) and how HUGE the queue was behind us! 😏 No wind motor to our final lunch bay. We anchored and free swung in another wonderful spot. Georgie joined me, Becca and Jay for a big swim to shore to look at marbles in the concrete jetty. Her swimming off the boat has come on an insane amount! We anchored within sight of another inflatable playground, but it was too far to take the kids. Instead Becca and I created our own version with everything we had that floated. See photos! No prizes for guessing who was best at that… 🙄 🐬 🤸‍♂️ Our final afternoon sail was our best yet! So lucky 😍 Wind was 18kts leaving the bay, so we put reefed sails out. 40 degrees off the wind would mean we would miss our target by half a mile, but we were absolutely flying so there was no way that engine was going on. Fortunately the wind backed as we went and we could keep pinching up until we were headed bang on course! In fact we headed quite a bit higher as the leeway on Asti is very noticeable. During the crossing from Solta the wind picked up to a steady 22kts, gusting 26kts. Asti was zooming along and we took a lot of pleasure catching and overtaking boats ahead of us who had all their canvas out and were subsequently overpowered, majorly heeled over and even kept rounding up! In comparison - Asti gave us no cause for concern and flew along at 6kts. Eventually we let all the sail out after the wind dropped to “only” 16kts and our speed briefly slowed to 4kts. After rounding the Trogir headland we sailed close haul and took the main sail down whilst sailing under headsail. It was so much smoother than using the engine to try and hold head to wind. This also allowed us to bear away afterwards and glide downwind towards the marina under the headsail. Bliss. We were going 3.5kts giving us the perfect amount of time to prepare lines and fenders and ditch Little Toots. Our marina mooring was, in a word, terrible. Il give it 1/10. 1 because we went super slow and everyone was prepare so no damage was done and I don’t think anyone was stressed. I lost the remaining marks by not coming into the berth quick enough to hold our course against the strong cross winds. This, in combination with no bow thruster, resulted in us being pinned on 3 other yachts in the marina 🙈 🤦‍♀️. Two RIBS towed us off and we parked up fine and checked out the boat. Great work from the calm roaming fender team 💪 thank you! And that’s the lot - a life ambition to sail with my mum and grandparents (who used to do flotillas - without me - when I was a small child). Also my first time skippering so many people and first time with kids onboard! Can’t wait for the next one 😊