In the evening of 26th August we arrived to Bar. We did customs behind a fence and then moved on its other side to marina. It was a strange feeling to stand on the ground again after 33 hours of navigation.
Marco and Belle decided to end their adventure, and left us the very next day. No wonder after three months on the sea… It was quite sad, but I believe it was the best solution for all. Immediately after saing goodbye we left Bar and set up sails towards Budva, to forget the sadness.
Spectaculous coast of Montenegro with greens merging to rocks of various colors, fresh breeze on the back and amazing clouds made us so excited that we almost forgot about time and arrived in Budva nearly in dark.
Budva has a beautiful old town surrounded by medieval walls, which is unfortunatelly very well known to tourists, especially from Russia.. Very wild nightlife, loud music till the morning… Nothing for us.
Next day, Wednesday 28th, after one more walk through the old town, we left this place and headed to the Herceg Novi bay. We stayed (for the first time from Corfu) on anchor, in a pleasant bay U. Krtole (O. Stradioti) near to a charming monastery on little island. Temperature during the night fell down about 10°C, and Luigi got cold.
On Thursday we slowly moved by engine to the very end of this inlet, to city of Kotor. We climbed thousand steps to a spectacular mountain castle of St. John, than visited all streets of its old town.
In the late evening a huge motorboat moored at our side (despite there was almost 20m of more free space), and literally squeezed us between two boats of double length.
Next day we took aboard one lady (which we met previous day on fortress) as a passenger for short trip to islands in front of Perast. We took a bath and lunch on anchor and before evening were back to Kotor. This time we decided to avoid city quay and stayed on anchor. In the middle of night, local gusts of 25kt wind arrived and anchor released from muddy bottom. Three times we woke up and reanchored the boat. Early in the morning (around 8 am) we left this beautiful place with bloody awful holding.
Next stop was at customs quay in Herceg Novi, where we found that it has never been a customs port. We did a nice training of mooring manouevre at least… So, we went 2 miles back into the gulf and checked-out from Montenegro in Zelenika. In afternoon we sailed very comfortably in 14kt wind up to the town of Cavtat, ancient Epidauros, in times of Venezian reign Ragusa Vecchia. Shortly before sunset we moved from local customs quay to an unofficial private mooring buoy. It was unfortunately too close to other boat, so we took a stern line to another one. Owner of buoys was luckily out of town, so after the previous crazy night and 10 hours of navigation we finally slept well.
