The Voyage of the Mighty Tenho: Croatia

I must admit, Croatia is one too-cute town after another, on perfect little islands. But don't look too closely...there's a veritable soup of plastic bits swirling in pools here and there offshore and covering the shoreline. Not that other places we’ve been haven’t had similar problems, but not like this. In Turkey, the beach debris seemed to be mainly household plastic with Hebrew, Turkish and Arabic writing, and it actually made for interesting beach combing as the kids found toys, shoes and other oddities (the mannequin foot was my favorite). And in the Chesapeake, even the tiniest and most remote beach we can find is guaranteed to have at least several balloon strings from the American infatuation with releasing balloons to celebrate events. Here it seems to be more commercial/industrial waste, consisting of tar balls like big piles of poop, nets, bins and containers. We also had our first experience with a privately owned bay. Who knew you could own the restaurant on the beach and also charge anyone $50 for anchoring up to half a mile offshore.

Our favorite thing in Croatia is to sail to a new island every day,anchor in a secluded little bay and spend the evening dinking around on shore (and wishing for at least occasional internet). Provides a great opportunity for "Strike Team Alpha" to practice our moves...we can now the get skiff launched off the bow and ready to zip to shore in 4 minutes 10 seconds!

We're now in Pula, near the border between Croatia and Slovenia. We'll stay here for a few days for a birthday celebration with our Slovenian friends, then we'll head back down the Adriatic.