I charter regulatory in the med and have done since passing my RYA qualification 5 years ago, (you will need this, or equivalent, for Croatia) in fact I've never chartered anywhere else (other places have tides!)
I've done most of the popular places, and I've just come back from Croatia. We charted with Waypoint Yacht charter out of Trogir (Split). There is a big charter fleet in Trogir, multiple operators and I would guess hundreds of charter
boats. The whole town is basically geared around chartering.
This means its got some positives and some negatives.
Positives are, it has a big-ish supermarket right by the marina, nice old town full of yachties to chat to, and well established chartering community (stuff like topping up at the
fuel and water docks is well managed on changeover days even if it looks like total chaos). Its also
cheap, much cheaper than Greece/Spain/Italy for
food and drink I found, about 30% cheaper.
Downsides are the
weather is a law unto itself, you can be in 9 knots of
wind and loping along nicely when you round one of the many small islands and you get his with 40 knots from nowhere. It happened to us pretty much every day. It's more fun than dangerous though if you like that sort of thing. Theres never much fetch so the water is almost always calm, its just light wind or lots of wind on an ever changing cycle.
Holding is generally poor in most of the
anchorages, its rocky hard bottom with about 1cm of sand on top. We used long (or not so long actually) lines ashore every night. Plus side is the topography is steep, so you can get close enough to the shoreline in most
anchorages to literally step off onto the rocks if you are brave enough.
Changeover day is total chaos and would terrify me if I didn't have a 20 or so charters under my belt. You absolutely have to be able to handle a sailboat under close quarter conditions ore you will come a cropper. There are boats everywhere and he wind is usually blowing 15-20 knots mid afternoon so you have that to contend with too. We saw 4 collisions between charter boats whist we were waiting our turn to fill up with
fuel. Its also the main
route for the numerous tourist day
cruise type power boats and they plough the channel not slowing down for anyone.
There's nowhere near as many
dock side med-style mooring opportunities as you get in Greece, that's perfect for me as once I leave the
dock I
anchor out every night, but if you want to go ashore for
meals in the evening Croatia isn't the place for you.
All in all I loved it, a bit more requirement to actually know how to sail a boat than in some of the other med locations I've been and Waypoint themselves were great to deal with. The boat was spot on and had a powerful rig in good condition with an overlapping
genoa etc... which meant you could really cover some distance. Many times charter boats have
sails so small and so worn the the boat is basically
motor sailor in less than 25 knots of breeze.
I used £14 of
diesel all week and that was most just to charge the house bank. Sailed everywhere.
Hope that helps.
Linear Mode
Recent Discussions