The small wooden boat wallows through the rolling waves. Late summer sun glistens on the water. Up ahead a small island rises from the horizon, pink rocks topped with a sliver of green vegetation. As we draw closer we can see there's just one building: a square, white lighthouse, that, mad as it seems, is to be our home.
We pass round to the island's far side, which conceals a little cove and stone pier. The boatman cuts the engine and we coast in, hands dangling over the boat's side into the perfectly clear water.
There's just one path on the island. A long avenue, roughly paved with pebbles and lined with abundantly flowering bushes, runs 150 yards in a straight line up from the cove to the lighthouse. It feels as if no one has been here for years. Grass grows up between the stones, little lizards scurry away with every footstep. My girlfriend and I wander up in a daze, plastic carriers from Gatwick duty free dangling from our hands. Not quite believing we are to have this entire island to ourselves, we stay silent. The only sound is the cicadas, and the boatman bumping a rusty wheelbarrow containing our luggage up the path behind us.
Maybe it's being brought up on tales of the Famous Five on Kirrin Island, then spending teens watching Bond films where baddies' lairs are surrounded by sea (and peopled by girls in bikinis), but for most people the two most alluring words in travel are 'private island'. By adulthood, we've accepted that in reality their delights are reserved for Bransons and Trumps, but that just makes the fantasy all the more potent.
So lean closer for travel's biggest secret: private islands are not just for millionaires. Not by a long shot. Yes, booking one, organising the hire car to get from the airport to the nearest port, then the boat transfer and the buying of provisions to take with you, takes marginally more effort than going on a package to Tenerife, but it certainly need not cost more. Our own island - Plocica, off Croatia's sunbaked coast - costs as little as £460 a week for up to six people in May or from mid-September onwards - less than £80 per person. Even in peak summer season (when it can be too hot anyway) it would only be £134 each.
But then in Croatia, islands aren't exactly a scarce resource. There are more than 1,000 dotted along the coast. Some boast beautiful towns built by the colonising Venetians as miniature versions of their home city, just a short hop back across the Adriatic. Others have Roman ruins, or are covered in vineyards; many are deserted. On nearly 50 there are lighthouses, some of which are operated today by computers rather than lighthouse keepers, whose accommodation is let out instead to tourists.
Several of the lighthouses for hire are the great tall columns of your imagination, poking up from barren rocks hours away from the mainland, surrounded by vertiginous cliffs and 'not advisable for young families'. Plocica is less extreme. It looks more like a big whitewashed Italian villa, with a squat light stuck on top and is only about 45 minutes from the land, in a sea channel halfway between the large and well-known holiday islands of Korcula and Hvar.
To get there you fly to Dubrovnik, drive a couple of hours north to Orebic, take a 15-minute car ferry across to Korcula town and continue half an hour to the sleepy village port of Prigradica. There, Ante Petkovic, boatman, harbour master and lighthouse warden, throws your cases into his boat and you set sail.
Ante has known the lighthouse since he was a child, when he used to help the keepers, and has looked after it since the last one left. When we reach the lighthouse he takes out a giant key, creaks open the vast door and starts fussing round, checking the paint on the shutters and the pump for the rainwater tank and scrubbing the fridge. He plainly loves the place. We begin to worry that he might be planning to stay the night with us.
Inside the four-foot-thick white walls, it's not luxurious. The rooms are simply furnished, with cheap plywood cupboards and scratchy carpet. There's solar-powered hot water and lights, but no TV or phone. It's actually broken into two apartments, one upstairs, one down, but as long as you avoid July and August you're unlikely to clash with anyone else.
Finally, Ante finishes his checks and bids us farewell, but just when we think we have the place to ourselves, he rushes back excitedly. Without any shared language, he leads us down to the shore and in urgent sign language motions us to quietly crouch down. Then we see it - a shoal of fish is nibbling on seaweed in the shallows, their tails all flapping several inches above the water, and waving at us like a thousand fishy hands.
Walking the perimeter of our domain takes about 25 minutes. One side slopes gently into the sea; on the other, a small rocky cliff rises up about 30 feet. All the way around, the smooth, square rocks are a warm yellow that turns pink at sunset. Dive in and you realise why the sea is so turquoise - there's no silt, just the same flat yellow rocks that make it feel like you're swimming along the bottom of a vast, natural swimming pool.
There's absolutely nothing to do, of course - just swim, snorkel, and read. As evening fell, we tied the washing line to a bottle of champagne and chucked it in the sea to cool. We watched the sun set with the perfect cocktail - Moet from a salty cup, garnished with a few grains of sand.
Next morning we spot Ante's boat again, as he chugs back across the water to cook us lunch. He'll do this as often as you want, sometimes catching the fish on the way. Today, as I'm a journalist, he brings along Mario Prizmic, the local agent for Adriatica.net, the company which lets the lighthouses, plus some visiting friends. They're carrying armfuls of food and in high party mood.
Ante fires up the barbecue; Mario starts telling us about his life. On the surface Croatians might seem a bit dour (understandable as it's only just over a decade since they emerged from the agonies of a horrific civil war), but get talking and it becomes clear they share a sense of humour more like ours than any other European nation.
There's a reason. Apparently while Yugoslavia's communist regime kept the country isolated from the West in many ways, the one commodity that flowed freely was television, and in particular British comedy. So today's thirtysomething Croatians suddenly startle you by making a reference to Del-boy, saying 'I have a cunning plan...' or shouting 'Basiiiil!'. Even as the civil war dragged on, they'd apparently come home to watch 'Allo 'Allo
Mario talks about his most formative moment, which turns out not to be when he was forced to leave his young wife and child to head off and fight the Serbs. No, it was when the lights came up at a Dire Straits gig in Zagreb, Mark Knopfler walked out and hit the opening chords to 'Money for Nothing'. 'There was me, a little communist boy from the countryside - it was like a new world!'
'Don't mention the war,' advises the guidebook, but in practice this makes life very hard since this is precisely what everyone wants to talk about. 'We still have a Serb in our village,' says Mario, and I'm expecting some heartwarming new-Europe flannel about how everyone lives in harmony these days and how deep down we're all the same. 'Everyone hates him. He's always doing stupid things like parking his truck in the street so no one can get past.' Ethnic tension has, it seems, bubbled down to parking wars.
Eventually Ante emerges, sweat-drenched and beaming, from the smoke-filled barbecue hut, proffering a vast platter of prawns, fresh squid and fish. Accompanying it is Posip, one of the best white wines produced on Korcula island. It's sold in smart bottles in the island's shops and restaurants, but Mario and Ante sneer at these and instead pull out a vast gallon-sized plastic flagon straight from one of their mates' vineyard.
They laugh when we pick the legs and heads off the prawns, instead just chomping them down whole. The squid, doused in garlic and fresh olive oil straight from the farm, are plump and delicious. 'Now is best time to eat them,' pronounces Ante. 'Full of sperm'.
It's a fabulous meal and lasts close to four hours, until the Posip has gone and the sun streaming through the lighthouse windows has turned red. It's amazing how doing nothing fills the day. You make lunch, drink a few beers, patrol the island and suddenly it's time to watch the sunset again.
Soon the visitors are gone and the island is ours once more. Surely, for city dwellers at least, the ultimate holiday luxury isn't a bath butler or pillow menu, but this - the complete absence of other people. You could, if you wished, wander round completely starkers, although you might raise the odd gasp from the British families who pass by at regular intervals on flotilla sailing holidays.
The first night, as the wind banged the shutters, our solitude felt slightly worrying, but soon we were relishing it. We'd only been there 24 hours, but when a rogue yacht landed in the cove we felt it with the shock of Robinson Crusoe finding a footprint. We watched surreptitiously from the safety of our terrace until they decided to obey the private sign and moved off.
A family or two could easily amuse themselves here for days, the kids roaming around having adventures, the adults relaxing by the barbecue. But when you tire of solitude, it's easy to make day trips too, either by hiring your own boat or getting Ante to ferry you. Korcula town is stunning and the vineyards that line the route there all welcome tasters. Hvar, covered in lavender in spring, has beautiful beaches and wooded walks.
We only stayed two nights, but longed to stay for more. As we chugged back towards the port in Ante's boat, we craned our necks round, looking backwards until the moment our island finally receded into the sea.
How to get there
Tom Robbins travelled with Adriatica.net (020 7183 0437)
which has a selection of lighthouses in Croatia.
Plocica costs from £76pp per week in
low season, to £134 in mid-summer, based
on six sharing a three-bed apartment
and not including flights. BA (0870 850
9850) flies from Gatwick to
Dubrovnik from £118 return. Contact the
Croatian National Tourist Office (0208 563 7979).
· For more cheap island breaks see our article: The bargain hunter's guide to private getaways
