
First Day
By mid-morning we had left the harbor and motored into the narrows between the highway and low, hog-back hills pinching in from the starboard side. The shore was lined with black floating barrels anchoring "shells," commercial mussel operations. On each side of the bay the sloping hills beyond were the broken outlines of the ubiquitous stone walls defining the ancient fields where olives and grapes once grew. There were no trees now and the geometry of the fields formed a quilt of antiquity. The ancient city of Trogir was tucked into the next cove south but we couldn't yet see the church tower. It was still three or four tacks ahead of our view. Instead we gazed sated with the simple architecture of the old walls and the sage-green cover of the hills. Only the white windmills revolving on the ridge-line annoyed the timeless feel of sailing.
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View from the head of the bay before we made the last tack for the reach to the island of Brac --

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The carst of Zagoria forms a layer cake on the horizon and like a knife slashes through the range, forming the gorge where the Cetina River passes through. The river flows from a valley beyond, and in the foreground, Split, sprawled against the hills.
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Bobovise
Beautiful harbor, deep and calm. We had a great waitress at dinner who spoke good English. After dinner we walked up toward the castle ruins, but never got there. Grasshoppers in the dry grass, a lonely road headed into the wild dry island countryside.
Later, a big storm came from the west. All the rigging clanging in the harbor. Flags flapping. Sky to the north the color of a bad bruise. Locals out on their balconies watching the weather. Betsy said, "This is what forty knots feels like." There were ghosts of that big wind all night, but now the storm waves begin. We could be here all day, riding it out. I love the color of the islands. Sage green. Dark green. Gray green. Purple. Orange. Brown, and the water going from aquamarine to turquoise to gray.
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Hvar Town
Another cruise ship has now taken the place of the one that pulled out overnight-- the production line of industrial tourism, and us one level up or down, the yachting crowd, Jenneaus rented by the week for cruising the islands, any islands. Saw one pod of exceptionally obnoxious sun-burnt American tourists on shore all wearing "Red, White, and Booze" matching tees. I'd say here we finally crossed wires with "Tourist Croatia."
Later motoring out, old fisherman standing in his tight white underwear in his cluttered wooden boat, pulling in a net. Russell says he looks like the guy in Water World bartering for paper.

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Vis
Waking up to the sounds of cicadas onshore. Much more quiet harbor than last night. We went ashore to eat dinner. A place with a live lobster pit right in the middle. We had grilled scampi, a local fish stew, and a grilled snapper, some local grilled vegetables, all washed down with a liter of local white wine. Then we had gelatos on the quay. So many people out walking. Not tourists. Island residents, including animals. A little boy chasing a cat, an old bull dog sleeping right in the middle of the street. Up one narrow alley I saw folks talking in a tiny one-chair barber shop by one bare lightbulb.
Our dock-mates (Brits in next boat over) eating breakfast on the stern, overhead us talking about dinner, described their local wine the night before as "a bit this side of ordinary."
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Sailing from Vis-- next to last day-- sailing! sailing! sailing! 20 knot winds. Flying. Still blowing hard. Rob said that this is what he wants someday: to own a boat, to live on a boat, to be a sailing migrant.
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Starigrad
Sitting in our last harbor-- number 5-- and there's been a town here for 2400 years. I love the feeling of old habitation. We walked out in the Starigrad Plain yesterday, a Unesco World Heritage Site-- olive groves under unbroken cultivation since the Greeks, a grid-work of fields laid out 24 centuries ago. Olives and grapes, the two essentials for the Mediterranean life.
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Back in Marina Harbor
How long can you look at a landscape before you can enter it? A living being is one thing. You can talk about understanding another person or an animal, but what of a range of islands? Is five days enough? They are even more silent, more dense in their closedness. Or this water, blue beyond belief.
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