Some weeks at sea blur into one long, sunlit afternoon. This one refused to. Six days out of Pirovac, five of us aboard, a boat that wasn't the one we'd reserved, and a storm that held its fire until the final night. Here it is exactly the way the log remembers it — position by position, anchorage by anchorage.
The crew: Boris on the helm; Suzan, who somehow ran a whole floating household out of a galley the size of a wardrobe; Vicky; and the two who slept on deck and treated every drama as entertainment, Rick and Jan. Five people, one forty-one-foot monohull, and a chain of Croatian islands waiting to be lost in.
A yacht called Lazarus
We pulled out of the driveway at half past midnight and rolled into Marina Pirovac a little after ten, gritty-eyed and hungry for salt air. Then came the twist. The Bavaria 34 we'd booked — Siesta — had limped back from the charter before us with damage, and wasn't going anywhere. For an uneasy hour it looked as though the holiday might run aground on the dock before it had begun.
The base — Aquatoria Yachting, out of Marina Pirovac, where we'd booked the whole trip through Boataround — handled the setback without a shrug and found us something better: a bigger boat, a Bavaria Cruiser 41S, a proper outboard for the dinghy thrown in, and a name that read like an omen — Lazarus. A boat brought back to sail again. From the first click to the final handover the whole thing was faultless, and the swap barely registered as a hiccup. We chose to take it as a good sign, and mostly it turned out to be one.
Check-in ran deep into the afternoon — thermometer, inventory, and the one rule that matters on every handover: photograph every scratch before you sign. Then a slow wander through Pirovac, a serious shop to fill the lockers, and a first, restless night tied to the dock, the boat ticking and shifting beneath us. In the morning, at last, we'd let go the lines.
The anchor that wouldn't bite
Lines off a little before eight. Early September in the Adriatic is often glass, and it was — a breath of westerly, then a soft southerly, the log ticking a patient four to five knots under engine the whole way south. Sun, not a cloud, the horizon sharp enough to cut. One flash of drama mid-afternoon: a stray gust out of the northwest, eight knots and rising, a front sniffing past our shoulder and gone almost before we'd reached for the sheets.
We slid into Blue Bay at Rogoznica just after half past three, tired and pleased with ourselves — which is precisely the moment the sea decides to teach you something. The anchor went down, held for a heartbeat, then let go and began to walk across the bottom. Too many hands, too much helpfulness, not enough patience. So we did the only sensible thing: hauled it all back up, motored a slow, humbling circle, read the seabed properly this time, and set it again with a line run ashore. It bit, and it stayed bitten. Dinner tasted better for the trouble. And with it began the habit that would define the week — a look on deck every couple of hours, whatever the clock said.
A lunch off Šolta, a night on watch
South again, a light easterly on the nose, islands sliding past on both sides. We broke the passage in a quiet cove off Šolta — swim, eat, doze, engine off, the finest kind of nothing — then carried on toward the Pakleni islands off Hvar and dropped the hook in a beautiful, crowded anchorage.
Beautiful, and busy. Late-summer traffic pushed a restless swell through the bay, and Lazarus fidgeted at her chain and shore line all evening long. So we kept the old discipline and stood watch — a look on deck every two hours through the night. She never moved. There is a particular, hard-won calm in climbing out at three in the morning, checking the anchor under a sky thick with stars, and finding everything precisely where you left it.
"You don't sleep badly at anchor because the boat moves. You sleep badly because you love the boat. The two-hour check is how you make peace with both."
A bumpy crossing, and the greenest hour
The channel between Hvar and Vis had teeth that day — the only genuinely unruly water of the trip, the wind boxing the compass from north to northwest to west and the sea confused beneath it. Jan went quietly, heroically green, folded in on himself for a long ninety minutes — and then, as seasickness mercifully does, it let him go. He surfaced, blinked at the horizon, and ate his lunch as though nothing at all had happened.
We paid our respects to the famous Blue Lagoon (worth seeing once), slipped past Stiniva and the little town of Komiža, found a bay for lunch, and by mid-afternoon picked up a mooring buoy off Vis — the one night all week we didn't trust to our own anchor. Then the small, disproportionate luxury a dinghy buys you: an outboard run into town for supplies, and an ice cream that felt entirely, gloriously earned.
A jewel of a bay, and a warning on the forecast
Northbound now, and the weather models began to mutter. Strong wind coming, they said; a storm by evening. We had miles to make, so we made them — a best of just over six knots with engine and a scrap of sail — but we still stole an hour in a tiny, hushed, tucked-away cove off Mali Drvenik, the kind of place the log simply records as lovely and leaves it at that.
We tied up at Primošten by early evening, anchor plus a line ashore, everything double-checked. The gusts came in the dark exactly as promised and worried at us all night long. But the holding was good, the spot was quietly magical, and we lay there and let the wind do its shouting from the safe side of the equation.
The one real sail — and the race back
This was the day the week earned its stripes. A serious blow out of the northwest was forecast to fill in overnight, so the plan was simple and unromantic: be in the marina before it is. And then the sea, contrary right to the end, handed us a gift on the way — a building southerly, ten knots then fourteen, and for one clean, glorious stretch mid-morning we killed the engine altogether and ran under headsail alone at five knots. After a week of patient motoring, real sailing at last: the quiet, the heel, the wake hissing off the transom. The whole boat grinned.
We came into Marina Pirovac around two and set her against the pier in a brisk ten knots, spring lines led forward from the left — the kind of berthing that makes a skipper earn his coffee. And then the sky delivered on its threat. The wind stood up hard after nine that evening, the storm rolled through in the small hours, and we lay warm and dry on our lines, listening to it pass and feeling just a little smug. You don't always beat the weather. It's a very good feeling when you do.
A farewell sail to Vrgada
The storm blew itself out and left a clean, bright, rinsed-blue morning behind it — far too good to waste tied to a dock. So we slipped the lines one last time and pointed the bow at the little island of Vrgada, dropped the hook for a final swim and a long, unhurried lunch, and then turned Lazarus for home. Back at the pier by three.
And that was the week: six days, a full loop of islands, one storm outrun, one perfect sail, a night of anchor-watch, and a boat that never once let us down. Nobody hurt, nothing broken, and — for all the small dramas — not a single anchor lost. These are exactly the days that turn, back home, into the stories you tell for years.
Bavaria Cruiser 41S · “Lazarus”
Bavaria Cruiser 41S · “Lazarus”
Charter · 2017Chartered from Aquatoria Yachting at Marina Pirovac, booked through Boataround — faultless from the first click to the final handover.
What the log remembers
We kept the whole week by hand — a fix every hour or so, latitude and longitude, wind and course, and a little "M off" scrawled wherever the engine died and a bay began. It's a lovely, old-fashioned thing to do. It's also a stack of paper that quietly fades in a drawer.
So back home, the paper log became a digital one. Every anchorage a pin on the map. Every "M off" an anchor spot, complete with the hours we stayed. The confused crossing to Vis, the one real sail off Primošten, the night on watch in the Pakleni islands — all of it in Sailing Log, and then turned into a book we can actually hand around the table. This story is that logbook, read out loud.
The offline logbook that becomes a story
Log your trip on the water — GPS fixes, anchorages, weather, a fair cost-split for the crew — all offline, no signal required. Then Sailing Log turns the whole voyage into a beautiful, shareable book, exactly like this one. Buy it once, keep it forever, no subscription — in 27 languages.
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