Checked out of Greece but actually didn’t leave right away as usual tried to wait for some wind to sail away…….so we spent a few days on the Northern Greek Island of Eriekoussa and waited for some decent weather to push us up the coast to Montenegro. While we were there we hiked and explored the island a couple of times as it is really not that big of an island and we were able to walk it in a couple of hours. We stopped off at a secluded beach for a swim and swam off the boat of course, generally watched the quiet island life and “spynoculared” (Jacqui’s form of boat entertainment, beats TV 🙂 yachts that came in … and out while we waited for some wind.

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We had seen an advert on facebook regarding the sale of a Rocna 33 anchor only 3 months old, so Jacqui made contact sent a deposit and on a wing and prayer had a delivery promise to Montenegro for Sept 30/Oct 1. As it turned out (and a few AIS stalking on their position) the couple were sailing past Ereikoussa on their way to Montenegro so nicely rafted up whilst we were at anchor and delivered the anchor, It was like Amazon Prime Delivery.

We choose the 30th for our departure date, the wind was supposed to be blowing gently from the south so it was a good opportunity. We had hoped to sail but we ended up motoring except for about 2 or 3 hours of sailing during the day and then the wind just died out. It was an overnight sail so we decided on the shifts, Jacqui took the first one at around 7pm-10pm and put out a little bit of sail out as it was going dark, you might know at that point the the wind picked up and we had to scramble to get most of the sails away. We loose the daylight and it decides to blow like snot all night, we ended up with a little bit of mainsail for stability whilst it blew 30-35 knots from the North East with a Easterly swell right on the beam yuck !!! to say we were pretty tired and rank the next day is an understatement, at no point did the forecast call for those conditions. Good old Med sailing either no wind or ……… buckets of it, nowhere in the forecast was it supposed to be blowing like that we limped into Montenegro around 11am next day.

As per the requirements we flew our curtesy and Q flag for customs clearance/checking in procedure and tied up to the customs area dock. Jacqui went do her first clearance (well in last 35 years any way) into another country and find out where our berth was going to be for the next 7 months. Everything went off without a hitch which was nice, they were organized, pleasant and it took about 1 hour. Noel was left on the boat and happened to snap a couple of pictures of the Black Pearl that was docked behind us. (They can rotate their masts, it was amazing to see).

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After paying a tourist tax, cruising tax (vignette) we moved to our J Berth allocation and started to look around where we would be calling home for a while, the number of mega/super yachts tied up surprised us and had to take a step back and wonder what we are doing here, we definitely were feeling out of place as everyone is dressed to the nines, trust some of us live-aboard yachties to bring that down to earth in a hurry ha…. I think we are on the poor cousins jetty and that suits us just fine. We did manage to find a very nice restaurant in the marina area where we can get an Americano for 1 Euro and a Latte for 1.80 Euro. We are finding out that some things are being over-charged and others are very reasonable.

One of the benefits of being here is the fact that there is a squash court available to us. We have already played twice and the operated shoulder is feeling just fine, but the fitness level has dropped as you can imagine. We took the bikes out of the “garage” and after a bit of usual maintenance headed out to explore the infamous Bay of Kotor which is the opposite side of the bay about 15KM away. Breathtaking and stunning area, lots of older buildings and a narrow road on the waters edge. Found a different route back which took us through a 1.6KM long tunnel. Not the best for cycling in. A lot of traffic and when the big trucks and buses go by it can be scary. Jacqui scratched up her arm when one of the buses went by just trying to stay upright on the bike. After that we walked the bikes on the narrow sidewalk.

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There are lots of hiking trails around us so decided we could hike over the mountain to the Bay of Kotor, we managed to get to the top but got turned around and lost the path that we should be on. Good old Google map came to the rescue to got us back down to the marina. Lots of great views along the way.

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As we know it the sun disappeared and now we are on day three of rain, thunderstorm, lighting and yes more and more rain…… we managed our biking and hiking in the sun and now we get to enjoy squash during in this crap weather, getting boat chores done as well as an upcoming road trip on Saturday to Dubrovnic Croatia as part of the crew club they have organized here (catering to the super yachts again) but we get to be classified as crew for the scheduled outings. So far pretty good choice to winter here not shy of things to do and see……..