41:51.2N 17:42.0E

The Snark on The ARC
Ben Little
Tue 28 Jul 2009 21:49
Hi there,
 
Writing now from the centre of the Adriatic, we are out of sight of land and mid way between Hvar and Corfu which is our target for this leg of the journey.  Unfortunately for this latest leg we have very little wind and in order to get to our destination in anything like a sensible time we have resorted to the old Iron mainsail (engine power).  The trip, around 250Nm looks like taking us around 35 hours without flogging the engine too much.
 
Since the last update from the Kournati national park (very windy stop over) we sailed south to Hvar in quite windy conditions up 30Kn of wind from NNE, we had our Asymetric out for quite a time but I took it in (with some rope burns) when the wind hit 20Kn as my crew are not too experienced and there was quite a swell coming up.  We had a couple of unplanned jybes as well which caused us to break 2 mainsail track cars   All in all quite a fun days sail if a little brisk at times.
 
Hvar is a very pretty walled town well worth a visit if you have the time or are in the area.  We took on fuel but could not find a berth for water, while the water maker is working it kills the batteries to fill up the tanks completely with it and since it is conflicting with the engine water intake we cannot run it at the same time as the engine.  It works well to run it every day to top up the tanks however and we will be doing that from now on.  Hvar was very crowded and the fight for a good anchoring position put us off spending another night there so we headed across to the local ACI marina and spent the night there tied up in comfort, gave the batteries a good charge and filled our water tanks.  There was very limited supply of chandlery goods in either Hvar or the marina so we have had to jury rig some fixes for the broken mainsail cars.  I hope we can find spares in Corfu.
 
So back now to the centre of the Adriatic, I guess we are around the half way mark.  It is pitch black we have no phone signal and so far we have not seen any shipping.  The coast guard has been calling out all day about firing practice for the Italian Navy, I finally managed to get the area co-ordinates which are miles from here and marked on the Italian coast in any case we were relieved to find.  Flipper and his friends were with us for quite a while and we got some video footage of then dancing in our bow wave.  Sadly however the Bonito which I guess they were hunting did not bite on our line so we were on pasta for dinner tonight.  Maybe dwan will show something on our line.
 
Hope to check in again in Corfu where maybe we can add some photos.
 
Ben, Ben and Sam in the Adriatic.