June 1, 2013. Dobar Dan from Split, Croatia! It’s a brand new cruising season for Lazy Bones, and we are very excited about our journey. This year we are cruising from Preveza, Greece, up the Dalmatian Coast through Croatia and into Venice, Italy. After a month in Venice, we will cruise down the Croatian coast again, visiting the places we missed on the way up, then on to Montenegro, and finally over to the southern point of Italy and on down to Sicily, where we will end the season in October in Ragusa, leaving Lazy Bones for the winter in Marina di Ragusa. We left L.A. on April 23rd, and after a brief stop in London we arrived in Athens, Greece, after seventeen hours of flight time. We spent a night in a hotel and the next day took a six hour taxi ride to Preveza, in the northwest corner of Greece, where Lazy Bones spent eight months on the hard at Cleopatra Marina during the winter. The marina had done an outstanding job of working on some projects and getting Lazy Bones ready for our cruising season. We usually do not have work done in our absence, but Vasilis, the head engineer for the marina, impressed us with his knowledge and expertise and we felt confident about the quality of the skillsets they had. He kept us updated with regular e-mails and pictures of the work being done while we were back home in L.A. At our request, Lazy Bones was sparkling clean upon our arrival. After five days of further preparation and provisioning, she was ready to go. Our first bureaucratic step was getting our transit log, a cruising permit required for cruising in Greece, which we surrendered at the end of last season. Greece is in such dire need of money that they implemented a reciprocal cruising tax for non-EU boats that took us a bit by surprise. Even though we were home in the U.S., Lazy Bones was considered to be cruising in Greece, in spite of her being on the hard in a marina. The tax cost $1200 USD for Lazy Bones, 16.5 meters. Before we left Preveza, we heard there was a dance festival in the town square, with children from five to fifteen doing mainly modern dance and hip hop, followed by the adults doing traditional Greek folk dancing. We went with our friends Krasni and Michelle, whom we met last year at the marina, and enjoyed watching three hours of dancing followed by a nice dinner at the Mermaid restaurant. After getting our paperwork finished on May 4th, we set sail heading north toward the island of Corfu and arrived at our first anchorage, the tiny island of Anti-Paxos in the Ionian island group. The turquoise water has extreme clarity, so we enjoyed watching all the colorful fish swimming around the boat. It was too cold for us to take the plunge, but it didn’t stop the crew on a couple of boats from Germany from doing so, as it was probably relatively warm for them. We went ashore and hiked up a rocky trail through the beautiful green hillside to the top for a great view of the anchorage. The next day we made the leap of seven miles to the next island of Paxos and anchored in the bay of Lakka, a tranquil, unspoiled harbor town with Venetian-style pink and cream-colored buildings set against lush green hills. We spent two nights there, enjoying the walks, nice meals, and chats with fellow cruisers. Our final destination in Greece was Corfu, the best known of the Ionian Islands, with beaches and resorts along the entire coastline. Corfu is clearly a tourist destination with upscale shops and restaurants, all intermixed with the Venetian-era buildings of the old town. The seafront is a majestic esplanade known as the Spianada, lined with sidewalk cafes. We anchored north of the windmill in the Bay of Garitsa near the old fortress. We spent the next day taking in all the sights of Corfu town, including the massive Old Fortress originating in the 6th century, the New Fortress begun in the 16th century, and the Palace of St. Michael and St. George, which houses the Museum of Asian Art, with over 10,000 objects and artifacts from that part of the world, some of which were quite beautiful. We took the bus to Gouvia Marina north of Corfu town in search of a mechanic to fix our Yamaha outboard, which didn’t want to stop anymore and only wanted to run at idle or high speed, causing “hold on for dear life” take-offs. The next day we took Lazy Bones up to Gouvia and anchored outside the marina. We took the dinghy ashore and Spiros (half the men on Corfu are named Spiros after the patron saint) started furiously snipping wires and adjusting settings. In about half an hour he had the outboard purring happily and running smoothly at all speeds. We rented a car in Gouvia and toured the northern half of Corfu. The east coast has many beautiful bays to anchor in with slightly touristy fishing villages. The highlight of the west coast is Paleokastritsa, a stunning waterfront town with aqua coves and white pebble beaches surrounded by pine trees. Our last stop was the Ahillion Palace, built in the 1890’s by Empress Elizabeth of Austria and surrounded by lush gardens with a huge statue of Achilles Triumphant. Before turning in the car we stopped at the Lidl Supermarket, a German chain in Gouvia and stocked up on supplies. After four days in Corfu and trying to interpret an approaching weather front using five different weather resources, we decided to go ahead and check out of Greece to make our 27-hour overnight trip to Cavtat, Croatia, bypassing Albania and Montenegro. We managed to interpret the seas and winds well, but Mother Nature decided to give us a huge thunder and lightning show that night. We were surrounded by squalls and thunderstorms, with massive lightning strikes coming down all around us. We used the radar to track the monstrous thunderheads and adjusted our course several times to avoid them. We were glad when dawn broke and they started dissipating. Our next bit of excitement was being stopped by the Italian Navy to check all of our paperwork. Their job was to make sure that Albanians were not trying to enter Italy illegally, as we were only 42 miles from the east coast of Italy and not far from the coast of Albania. It seems everyone has their border issues. We arrived in Cavtat, one of the newest and most user-friendly ports of entry in Croatia, around noon and side-tied to the customs dock (we found out that we were supposed to go stern-to) and began our check-in process for Croatia. We went first to the port police, who kept our passports while we went to customs to check in and buy both our cruising permit for Lazy Bones and a Sojourn Tax, because Lazy Bones has beds aboard. Then to the ATM to get kuna (about 6 kuna to one U.S. dollar) and return to pay our fees, then back to the port police to collect our passports. The total cost for Lazy Bones was about $600 U.S. for one year of cruising. We asked the port police where they recommended we anchor since we didn’t want to moor stern-to the quay, and they suggested the big bay, Uvala Tiha (uvala means bay), around the corner from Cavtat harbor. We dropped the hook in the middle of the bay, which was lined with pretty cream-colored resorts and houses with red tile roofs, surrounded by pine-covered hills. That night the wind came up and we dragged at 2:30 in the morning and had to reset. We learned that we had experienced the mighty Bora, a cold dry powerful wind from the northeast. Hello Bora, goodbye sleep! Fortunately the Bora is less frequent in the summer, when the gentler, warmer Maestral wind from the northwest is predominant. The wind finally let up the next day so we took the twenty minute bus ride north to Dubrovnik, with an impressive looking Old Town (Stari Grad in Croatian) surrounded by massive ancient walls. Before entering the gate to the Old Town, we took the cable car (94 kunas each, $15 USD) to the top of Mt. Srd for the spectacular view of Dubrovnik and the beautiful blue Adriatic Sea. We even spotted Lazy Bones through the telescope at the viewpoint. Upon returning, we entered the east gate and took the city wall walk (about one hour) around the fortress, which provides great views over the terra-cotta tiled rooftops of old stone shops, restaurants, and houses with laundry hanging out the windows. We also visited the Dominican and the Franciscan Monasteries, the Sponza Palace, the Rector’s Palace, and the Onofrio Fountain. The shelling of Dubrovnik in 1991 struck about 70% of the 825 buildings inside the Old Town, seriously damaging most of the buildings mentioned. Most have been lovingly restored, thank goodness. Before we left Dubrovnik, we went to the VIP communications store, recommended by our friend Krasni, for SIM cards for the iPad, laptop, and cell phone. We are now connected, but it took a week to get through all the technical problems VIP was having in giving us the credits we had bought to use the SIM cards.