Let me explain. I have a friend who sails. He has a shiny new yacht and he invites me on trips abroad. I hesitate - well, the North Sea is big, black and cold. Never mind, I tell myself, 16 hours of tedium or terror, depending on the weather, will be worth it when we moor in a Dutch, Belgian or French port and sit down at one of the seafood restaurants that line the quay...
But that's never how it works out. Why eat a bowl of mussels, says my friend, when there are tins of spaghetti hoops on board? Why explore a historic harbour when there are ropes to coil, things to splice? A sailing holiday for him, you see, is more about getting there than being there.
That's why Carolyn and I were in a flabby inflatable off the coast of Croatia in the dead of night, battling against a 20mph crosswind to get from our yacht to a restaurant. We'd been told it rarely had food but on we rowed, the lights of the restaurant slipping sideways, not closer. 'Left, right, right, right!' I shouted, but Carolyn couldn't hear as she gasped for breath between oar strokes.
The restaurant turned out to be a family-run affair and the women did all the work as their men got steadily drunker. We picked a fish neither of us recognised and saw it slipped into a woodburning oven the size of a beach hut. It was delicious and not even the price - a whopping £38 for the fish alone - could leave a bitter taste. We zigzagged back to the yacht, high on rough wine and stunned by a fiery Mars in the clear, black sky. Now that's what I call sailing.
Funnily enough, tips on finding your yacht while half-drunk hadn't been part of the briefing. This was a flotilla holiday and the Sunsail crew concentrated on practical and safety advice - flares, lifejackets, how not to sink the boat by leaving the lavatory seat up.
We had set out from a marina near Zadar, in northern Croatia, and were heading to the Kornati national park - an archipelago of hundreds of islands. The flotilla promised us the chance of having our own yacht for the week without being cast adrift as two inexperienced sailors. We'd have the comfort of a lead boat with a professional crew on hand should anything go wrong, but the freedom to sail independently during the day. All we had to do was get to a specific place each night and not crash too hard into anything. Not even watching Dead Calm the night before we left home could dent our enthusiasm as we prepared to set sail the first morning. Carolyn had been practising her knots and now claimed to be able to tie a clove hitch in the dark. Not much good, I figured, as 33ft yachts don't come with four-posters, but who knew where the skill might come in useful? The flotilla dithered, hanging on to the lead boat like ducklings, but finally our lines were chucked raggedly ashore and we gingerly motored out of the berth and into the main channel.
There was no wind, so the engine chugged on as we tried to work out where we were. We knew where we had to be that evening and we could locate it on the chart, but didn't really have much of a clue how to get there. The sea was filled with islands - some a few dozen metres long, others of several kilometres. The sun bleached out any perspective and the islands seemed to merge into one. We just sort of kept on going south, certain that we'd see any islands before we hit them. OK, I confess we weren't quite as casual towards the prospect of having to pay £300 accident excess as this - we planned to cheat to make up for the limits to our navigational skills. A friend (yes, the spaghetti tin man) had lent me a hand-held Global Positioning System. Thank God for the American military and its twinkly billion-dollar satellite sky.
When it came to the point to hang a left, we couldn't decide which channel to choose so we switched on the GPS. Carefully plotting its longitude and latitude on the chart, we found our position - slap bang on top of an island. We decided to trust our instincts instead and navigated our way safely through the channel, watching the depth get shallower and shallower with only mild to moderate panic. Only a couple of days later, by looking properly at the chart, did we work out we had to make an adjustment to get our exact position. (So that's why the CIA, with all its technology, hasn't been able to track down Osama bin Laden and Co. Give me a call, guys, I'm sure I can help sort it out.).
We managed to find a quiet bay for lunch and by the afternoon the wind had picked up and we sailed to our rendezvous point. The lead crew was already there and parking this unwieldy flat-sided thing, in reverse, which I had been dreading, was a cinch with their help.
So our routine was established for the next few days. There'd be a briefing in the morning at which the next port was set, weather forecast explained, potential lunch spots suggested; then the boats would cast off one by one over an hour or so and head off on their own chosen routes.
The islands of the Kornati were striking but disappointing. They were bare, dry and featureless - not the beautiful, pine-scented Adriatic landscape I'd been expecting. All but a few were uninhabited - but most had tumbledown pasture walls. Decades ago sheep farmers had seen their flocks munch the land back to rock and make the islands, already without fresh water, not worth the effort. The landscape has never recovered and the barren slopes made an uninspiring sight.
The sea, by contrast, lived up to expectations - astronauts have described the water of the Kornati as the bluest in the world - and it was crystal-clear. Very useful when I dropped my sunglasses in six metres of water and managed to spot them the next day while snorkelling.
We started to enjoy the sailing - somehow it's all much more sensible to be in T-shirt and shorts in the Med than in full wet weather gear somewhere off the Dutch coast. There was more wind than I expected and most days we'd soon switch off the engine and have both sails up, the yacht gurgling happily through the water.
One day we headed out of the cover of the islands and into a gusty Adriatic. Ooh, err - I gripped the wheel as the yacht tipped right over and I shouted at Carolyn to get ready to let go the sails so we could run screaming below and hide.
Actually, it was fine, we reefed in and surged ahead, hugging the sheer cliffs - it was fun, but life at 45 degrees palled after a couple of hours - I mean, how do you stop your glass sliding out of reach? - and we cut back into the main channel for lunch.
Lunch each day was an important part of our holiday. We made sure we spent plenty of time not sailing. So we'd try to find deserted coves for a picnic lunch, snorkelling and snoozing. This did not prove easy. Within half an hour of mooring, other yachts - often our fellow flotilla members - would be there too within shouting distance. Many were crewed by Germans - smiling, middle-aged, slightly tubby and naked. We got used to waving to passing nude helmsmen standing proudly at the wheel, but I couldn't help thinking that being so bare while so close to winches, cleats and coils of rope wasn't a good idea.
Being part of a fleet restricted lunch time - the group didn't set off till late in the morning and we were due at our destination by five-ish each day . We also found the flotilla a little bit too social. I'm no Howard Hughes, but the Sunsail team organised meals/drinks four nights out of seven. The nadir was when the social hostess tried to make us all play party games - I had to stop Carolyn using her clove hitch.
We had a week of building up our sailing confidence, longish lunches - and schmoozing barmaids across the Kornati for bags of ice to keep the fridge cold. Not sailing, I grant you, but a great sailing holiday.
Factfile
Richard Eilers booked his holiday with Sunsail (02392 222222). A one-week flotilla on the 32ft Oceanis 321 based near Zadar costs from £560 per person based on four sharing or £820 for two. Flights are from Gatwick or Manchester.
