Dolphin encounter in Croatia

Seeing dolphins in nature is not something that happens every day. I consider myself very lucky for encountering them quite a few times.

If you have been reading through my previous posts, I guess you guessed it already - my last encounter with these beautiful animals happened during my last sailing trip in Croatia.


While we were on a course for Jabuka island, they suddenly appeared in the distance on our port (i.e. left) side. Unfortunately a few moments later they were gone. When we already thought that was the end of it, they reappeared just next to the hull of our boat. We were sailing at around 6 knots without the motor. It seemed they liked this fact and swam with us for a while. There were around 10 dolphins in this group - some small and some quite large ones.

After five minutes of playing around and under our boat they decided to get back on their way.
I had just enough time to take a few photos, but none of them came out very impressive. It is quite hard to guess where and when is a dolphin going to come out from under the water. When it does swim to the surface, this happens just for a moment and then it is gone again.
This means luck is quite a factor when trying to take a good photo of a dolphin.

I hope one day I will be lucky enough to actually swim with dolphins in their natural habitat.
This time water was not really all that warm (it was just under 11 degrees Celsius) and I didn't even think about jumping in.
I am not sure doing that out on the high seas is such a good idea anyway. After all, those are wild animals I am talking about and anything can happen.

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Wordless Wednesday: View of Hvar seafront

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Sailing to Jabuka island

One of the goals of our last sailing trip was to sail around Jabuka island. Actually it is not so very special. This rock in the middle of the Adriatic sea can hardly be called an island. It really is small.


Jabuka in Croatian language means Apple. So if Apple corporation will ever be thinking of changing that bitten apple logo of theirs - a silhouette of this Apple island might be a good idea. I should probably put copyright on that one...

We tried to sail there a couple of times before but never made it all the way around.
Well this time I am proud to say we did it.

When we were closing in on the island we noticed an interesting thing... Some of the navigation devices on our boat started to act weird. For instance autopilot kept loosing direction. At first we thought it was some random electronic fault but after a while we realized only compass-based devices were having problems.
It was not a coincidence. Jabuka island was to blame.
As we learned later on, it is a volcanic island and one of its main building materials is magnetite - the most magnetic of all naturally occurring minerals on Earth.
When they hold a sailing regatta in those waters competitors even have to switch between radio channels because some of them simply stop working around the island. I guess this is a bit like what the Bermuda triangle must feel.


As I said all of this didn't stop us and we made it around there and back without much trouble. We had perfect winds and nice sunny weather. Nevertheless this trip took most of the day. When we were looking for a place to spend the night it was dark already.

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