I was lucky enough to spend this summer galavanting around the South Adriatic in my very own 36ft yacht (...kind of). I was part of a 'lead crew' on a 'flotilla'.
1. What is a flotilla?
On a flotilla holiday you have up to 12 yachts (ranging from a nice little 32ft Jeanneau to a big get-the-fuck-out-my-way I'm the king of the ocean catamarans). The guests who live on these boats for the week are generally made up of families and more often than not the dad is the avid sailor who has dragged the whole family along. At least 1 person on their yacht needs to have a skipper licence (driving licence for boats) although where some people get these qualifications from I'll never know.
On the first day we have a big briefing, we tell them all about the local area and the area we'll be sailing in. We give them some handy weather information and make sure that they are happy with the boats... then they're off!
The guests all leave and sail off into the distance towards the place we have agreed to meet for the evening. Meantime - it's TAN TIME for me (see below). Sometime between 5pm and 7pm that evening the guests all arrive (never ever ever ever on time) and we commence the evenings activity. For me this means getting very merry on tasty Croatian red wine whilst repeatedly hearing about the dolphins that EVERY GOD DAMN PERSON SAW EXCEPT FROM ME.
This happens every day - briefing, jolly little sail, evening fun. Repeat. All very nice and sophisticated (most of the time).
2. What is a lead crew?
Living on board our little Babalas (aptly named - means hangover in Afrikaans) was myself, a skipper and an engineer.
The skipper is in-charge of the whole sha-bang. They are also the person who drives the boat. Pretty self explanatory. The engineer fixes stuff and my job as the hostess was to make sure that all of the social stuff was organised (restaurant booked, orders taken, fun shit planned*).
*Fun shit = boat building competitions, poem competitions and quizzes.
As a ' hostess' for Sunsail my average day looked a little like this:
08.45 - Drag myself out of bed, potentially run a hairbrush through my hair, get ready for work (bikini, boardies and the glamorous Sunsail t-shirt)
08.50 - Down a coffee (''kava'' in Croatia, better than Turkish coffee), scrawl some information on a whiteboard for the briefing and crawl out of the boat into the sunshiiinnneeee
09.00 - Morning briefing with all of our guests. We'll find a nice spot in the shade, everyone will bring their coffees and we'll give them some information for the day:
Weather/wind forecast
Distance to next stop
Lunch stop suggestions
That evening's activities
Whether there will be a shop, toilets, showers and electricity at the next stop
Croatian word of the day*
*If I was feeling fun ;)
09.30 - 16.30 - Sunbattthhheeeeeeeee! Read a ridiculous number of books (roughly 30), play shithead cook the same pasta lunch every day:
- 1 and a half chopped onions, chuck in a frying pan with shiiiiitloads of honey and a big old squeeze of balsamic glaze. fry until the galley (kitchen) is a wonderful honey/balsamic/onion hot box
- boil enough pasta to feed a family of four
- put tin of chopped tomatoes in pasta
- add honey (lots)
- add paprika (lots)
- throw bubbling sticky mass of onion/honey/balsamic gloop into pasta
- add half onion raw to honey pasta goodness pot
- serve in big bowl and tell yourself you'll save half for dinner
- don't
16.30 - 19.00 - Await the imminent arrival of guests. Cue broken muffled calls on the radio telling us they'll be late because "the wind was blowing in the wrong direction". The moorings (way the boats park) was different every day, sometimes all the boats (up to 12) would be dotted around the bay on anchor, or sometimes we'd all be tied together in what is commonly known as a "raft" (see below).
19.00 - 23.00 - Each evening would differ... most of the time we'd go for dinner somewhere with all of the guests, one night a week we would go to a winey up on the hills on the island of Lumbarda and have a traditional Croatian meal with some taaastyy wine. Or sometimes, we'd have the evening to ourselves.. this usually meant a Chinese takeaway from the best (only) Chinese restaurant in Korčula.
A few times I meandered the long winding road to Boogie Jungle (definitely the islands hotspot), but only once did I make the mistake of taking some guests along for the night... "do we need ID? I'm only 14". Never again.
Eat, sleep, rave, repeat as they say in dance music.
Tune in next time for ski related banter :)
x