CROATIA CALLING

PART 1 LIGNANO [ITALY] TO RIJEKA [CROATIA]

Life is finally starting again: after almost two years laid up on land in Italy due to Covid travel restrictions, Azura, our Marlow 72 Explorer, is back in the water and engineers from the Lignano yard where she has been staying are busy remedying the numerous consequences of the lockdown. To put it simply, boats age twice as quickly in the Med as they do in our northern homeland. In Germany, boats are over-wintered in big sheds for six months of the year, whereas in the Mediterranean they remain exposed to the weather all year round. This means Azura has been suffering intense heat and solar radiation during the summer and rain and winds in winter which rip off everything that isn’t nailed down. As a result there are plenty of things to fix.

Before our first day at sea, and despite having already covered over 35,000nm aboard her, Jutta and I are both aware of a slight nervous tension in the air. Will the systems work? Will we find our sea legs? Will our well-rehearsed teamwork kick in straight