After a great night’s sleep, we awake early on Saturday morning to another glorious day in Uvala Smrka. Today it will be a short sail to the town of Milna and our first Marina in Croatia. Maria has coincided this with the FA Cup final so that we may watch it in a bar, even though we have the technology to watch it on board if necessary.

First off we are going to explore the bay and the submarine pen. The bay is pretty and we have some nice pictures of Mariadz anchored but the submarine pen is basically a large cave, I had in mind all sorts of James Bond villain underground engineering. No one is going to take over the world by refurbing that!

We return to the boat and decide today will be the first proper flight of our new drone, bought using the contents of the £2 jar. We get a number of shots of Mariadz and a video. Of course the most stressful part is bringing it in to land when there are lots of lines and protruding bits of stainless steel to break its fragile props. We decide to land it on the cushions on the aft sun bed and this works well until the breeze flicks up a towel just enough to catch it. Still everything seems to be ok but note to self no towels on sun beds for next flight.

Again, this will be about an hour and a half with no wind so no sails up 😦 we are basically just going around the island of Brac and the entire journey is uneventful. As we approach Milna, we radio the marina as advised in the guide books. There is no reply, a couple of more attempts and still nothing. Eventually I telephone the marina to be told by a lovely young lady that someone will be waiting on the pontoon for us.

It’s lazy lines again and he is putting us on the outside berth of the outside pontoon. There is no one else on there but apparently they will be full later. Maria brings Mariadz in and I throw the lines and then take them back so we can adjust ourselves from on board. He then passes us two lazy lines for the bow. He gives us a bit of advice to keep the stern lines loose while we tighten the bow but this isn’t our first rodeo! Still nice of him to give the advice. Bow lines on we then tighten them up further by tightening the stern lines and bringing Mariadz in close enough to the dock that we can step off the swim platform. She will not be moving.

We get off with the boat papers to check into the office and are greeted by a very friendly lady and we have a lovely chat while we check in and pay our fees. We get back to the boat where we now have power so Maria decides she will do some washing while we go off for a swim in the sea and then a shower in the very clean facilities. The coast of Croatia has been quite rocky and so we need swim shoes to get in and as we walk to the beach area, there is a bronze statue of a man fishing using a net from shore. This is just below a picturesque fish restaurant, bargo, which could be somewhere we can try later depending on how the day goes. The beach is rocky, like a lot in Croatia, but the sea is very clear if a little cold for us at 20 degrees.

We have our showers which is in lovely soft water great for Maria’s hair so she is happy. We then get back, tidy up and hang out some washing before heading into town a couple of hours before kick off of the FA Cup final.

It’s hot today and a lovely stroll into a nice little town. As we look back at Mariadz, it looks like the gypsies have turned up hanging out their washing! In town, there is a large sailing boat tied up on the quay and a bar just after that with a very nice outside area for eating. We ask them if they are going to show the game and they are afraid it isn’t on a channel that they subscribe to. However, there is a bar called Vox around the corner that will definitely have it. We quickly nip to Vox to confirm they will have the game and we are all set.

However, now we need to get some food and we agree to go back to the first bar, Bargo. They have a fish platter for two that sounds good and Maria is worried there won’t be enough food and so orders some calamari too. When it arrives we have two tuna steaks, large prawns, prawns on skewers, muscles and other shellfish with a huge plate of calamari. You know your fish platter is going to be filling when there are two tuna steaks! The food is great and we have a lovely view across the bay with me in the shade and marina in the sunshine. That is until the mini cruise ship, Princesza Diana, comes in and docks right in front of us. Oh well, we will be leaving shortly to watch the football.

We arrive at Vox next it quite full of Mancunians who are staying at a local hotel with their brightly coloured wristbands. There are some city fans but more United fans who are very quite noisy for 13 seconds until city score their first goal. Unfortunately, they get the opportunity to be noisy again later but city finally quieten them down with a winning goal and twenty seconds after the final whistle they have all gone!

After watching the trophy lift, that will be two out of three now (hopefully one more to go before this holiday finishes), we return to the marina to find the pontoon is filling up quite quickly. We had seen on our outside camera that somebody had come in next to us, glad we decided to put all of our fenders on that side and the rib on the other side.

We are just pottering now, tidying up the now dry washing when a nice lady comes up to us and asks us if we would like to eat in their restaurant this evening. After our large lunch we don’t expect to be too hungry but this is the place we looked at earlier and it looked very nice.

We arrive for our table a little later still not feeling too hungry but take a look at the menu. It is a really nice menu, designed like a newspaper with little articles dotted around describing the history of the restaurant and the husband and wife owners. We decide to eat a light supper, a scorpion fish and she persuades us to have the fish pate to start. As we have found with all of the food in Croatia it was very tasty. At the end we have had enough but I enquire about desserts. We are offered a tiramisu, my favourite Italian dessert. We didn’t come to Croatia to eat a dessert which would be immeasurably better in Italy, but the wife mentions that she is Italian! Oh well, that changes everything… one of those with two spoons please!

This marks our furthest point north and tomorrow we will start the slow journey back towards Italy.