We were scheduled to tender in Dubrovnik in the Gruz town, as the old town anchorage was occupied by two cruise ships and the dock by the Carnival Freedom. As the tender ride would be a long one, I arrived a little early to give as much time as possible for the guests to enjoy the port. I was not a happy person when I came around the corner and found that my assigned anchorage was occupied by one of the ships assigned to downtown. It turned out that there was some swell there and this particular ship could not keep a lee for its boats so it shifted. As a result I had to anchor further out and that increased the tender distance even more.

However nothing could be done about it, so I was glad that I decided to arrival ahead of schedule. The other ship left at 1600 hrs. and then I raised the anchor and moved in closer, reducing the tender distance by 5 minutes. The weather was off and on rain and sunshine. The rain came with wind gusts and that meant that I had to keep the engines going to help to control the ships swing as there was not much room to move about. Local television found the arrival of a 1000 ladies of sufficient interest to dispatch a camera team to film the tender dock. My 2nd officer who was supervising the shore side tender procedures was totally startled when he suddenly became the focus of the tv team as being the most senior officer present. Consequently he had to endure an interview in Croatian English. As a result he was world famous in Croatia for 5 minutes on the six o’clock news.

During the day the weather started to improve steadily and that means that by tomorrow we will have our normal sunny weather back again. As the weather here can change very very quickly I try to listen as much as possible to weather forecasts given on the VHF radio apart from checking the internet websites every morning and evening. A very good station is Bari radio here in the Adriatic. (Bari is a town on the East coast of Italy, about halfway down) It was funny to hear, at 08.30 the announcement started with a “Gale warning, rain and wind” and 10 minutes later the new weather forecast only mentioned sunny periods and light winds. Things had apparently improved rapidly in the South Adriatic in a very short period of time. All the better for us.