Pirates of the mediterranean
Heerenxvii
Fri 9 Jul 2010 21:03
P woke up around 9, so we had a nice breakfast while Felix fixed the remaining issues (a 'noot tiller', as in 'emergency rudder' -> hand made becase there is no spare part!!!).
Around noon P started his journey to Holland with my car, accompanied by four cans of RedBull.
The first part of the afternoon was also not bad. We left the harbour around 13:00 toward Umag, the first harbour in Croatia to go through customs. We had a nice breeze of wind (because we have to use the engine at near full thruttle for better use later on) and lots of sun. Umag seemed friendly and our landing in the harbour was smooth (thanks to the thrusters). Custom papers were filled in and we 'only' had to pay for our stay at the port master for our Croatian cruising pass.
I did not want to enter the tiny sweaty warm office of the port master, so stayed outside in the wind. As it was taking A a very long I decided to go and have a look what took so long and was welcomed with the words "We mogen er niet in" which means so much as that we were not allowed to enter the country... WTF? Apparently we were misssing some papers. And well, not like a paper with some nonsense, No, we of course missed the most important paper of all, the registration of the boat. The guy tried to explain that we were not registered in the Netherlands and thus kind of illegal. He suggested to call the embassy. Luckily it was only Friday 17:30 so that would be no problem...hmm...
After a few attempts and different numbers we spoke to someone who, after a lot of searching, confirmed that we had to have the boat registerd at the ANWB in the Netherlands, like a license plate for your car. At the moment there was not much we could do to better the situation, as going back to Slovenia would not solve the issue. Although they are EU, we would have the same problem.
So here we are... illegal, modern pirates. ANWB is closed and will likely not be open during the weekend. Funny enough our biggest worry is that we will not make our appointment with H&S in time to wach the soccer finals :( Will try to call the ANWB tomorrow but already working on a backup plan. We will either go back to Slovenia and leave the boat there till the problem is solved, or we will drive up to H&S to watch the finals and solve the problem later. Alternative is to fly back to Holland and fix the issue. The expectation however is that the paperwork will take 2 weeks and we'll have to wait before we can return and move the boat.
But, we took F's motto: "You should also celibrate failures", so we opened up the bottle of Moet Chandon that we brought and lit up the barbeque :)
