What a beautiful autumn day as we set off from the Split Marina, first to the Customs House in town then to clear Immigration. After a quick check out with the agent and local police, it was back to the boat and we were off!
Quite an amazing feeling to be leaving Split and Croatia behind, after nearly three years of research, contracts, sea trials, translations, legal certifications, surveys, insurances, flag deletion, Australian flag registration, etc. as we headed out from Split, down past Rogac on Island of Solta, Amazon's home for the past ten years.
It was a beautiful sunny day. As we passed so many island ferries, the wind started to pick up to a nice 15knots as we got past Solta and into champagne sailing conditions with main up and a nice 6 knots of boat speed heading out towards Vis.
Then it was head south past Hvar Island and a beautiful sail down towards Korcula.
Great conditions for our first overnight on Amazon with sunset behind us over Vis island.
It was all good until around 11 o'clock at night when the Bora paid a visit, gusting over 35 knots. We took a turn to the west to go outside of the Island of Mljet in case we got blown onto it!
Then it was continue down the coast as morning broke just south of Dubrovnik.
We had fairly heavy wind swell as we took a centerline down the Adriatic with Montenegro off to port, cloudy but all in all, pretty good conditions.
As we headed south we could hear Barri radio telling us about storms in the Tyrrhenian Sea and across the Italian peninsula and we could see it was pretty cloudy and forbidding. Turned out to be something like a weather bomb, with big fat low that crossed down off Syracuse Sicily which gave everyone down there a thrashing.
Started to see a lot of shipping crossing the Adriatic to Albania.
It was just getting dark as we read "the area reported (off Vlore Albania) in this chart is dangerous because of the former mined area. Vessels should only navigate during daylight hours".
Heart jumped as we came down just off the mined area and I looked out a saw some weird object about the size of a 44-gallon drum floating close off to port. It definitely caused a WTF moment!
As we came down off the Albania coast then another overnight and finally Kerkira Island lights came into view so it was up with the Q flag, then the Greece flag.
It was a really beautiful morning as we headed into Corfu gulf and on into Gouvia Marina.