You don’t need a superyacht to relish cruising the Adriatic

The Riva or seaside promenade in Split, on Croatia’s Adriatic coast – once the retirement home of Roman emperor Diocletian – is still thronged with people late at night, its pavement cafés full and its nightclub pulsations competing for airspace.

But the owner of the tiny café that we’re sitting in, just a few hundred metres from the action, wants to go home. We know this because she’s noisily stacking the empty chairs around us and sighing dramatically.

Finally, she cracks. “Don’t you have homes to go to?” she demands. And we do, in fact our home is just across, the street, rocking almost imperceptibly in the sea.

She’s a motor cruiser that has berths for 16 passengers, plus the crew, including, almost more crucially than the skipper, Philip the chef. It will be his, and only his fault, that when we leave after two weeks cruising around the Adriatic, that our vessel will be sitting lower in the water than when we embarked.

Depending on time available a cruise of the Croatian Adriatic can include a dozen or more of its nearly 70 inhabited islands but also ports of call on the mainland, including Dubrovnik, Split and Šibenik.

Because there is such a diversity of islands in a relatively compact geographic area (you could sail direct from the Istrian peninsula in the north to Dubrovnik in the south in less than a week if you don’t get tempted to stop en route), sailing from island to island usually takes only a few hours, which leaves most of the day to explore, swim, bike or frequent the waterside cafés and bars.

It's a simple pleasure, this tying up right beside World Heritage sites or in tiny villages where the post van has to move to let us put our gangplank down, but I never tire of it.

Even the larger cruisers that take about 30 passengers can nose their way into all but the smallest Croatian harbours. Both can anchor at the mouths of startlingly blue bays for their passengers to dive off stern bathing platforms into the Adriatic’s clear water.

Mornings generally start while in port with breakfast on the stern deck. Philip sometimes bakes his own croissants but if we’re in port a crew member will make a quick dash to a chef-approved bakery. I’ve met them a few times on the breakfast treat run, especially in the port of Hvar which was once part of the Venetian Republic.

This is one place I do like to get up early to walk through the stone-flagged streets of the town and then climb the steps to the 16th century Spanjola fortress. The view across the harbour to a scattering of pine-clad islands is worth the effort.

Hvar is famed for its nightlife, high-end hotels and big-spending glitterati who motor in on their luxury cruisers or superyachts. But we all get to stroll along the same harbourside promenade, inhale the perfume from the island’s famous lavender farms and if you venture a few winding streets from the sea, a Croatian cheese-filled filo pastry (börek) won’t cost you too much more than it would on a less fashionable island.

Korčula is another favourite island, with the tiny walled town only taking a few minutes to circumnavigate. But inside the walls you can encounter a Croatian male choir warming up under a limestone loggia or join the debate about whether Marco Polo really was born here (Korčula says yes, Venice says a vigorous no).

I like to swim in the sea off the walls and work up an appetite for an onboard lunch of grilled sea bream and a glass of locally grown Grk white wine. Here at sea level gives a great perspective on the town’s 13th and 14th century walls and towers but I also like to imagine what this narrow strip of water between Korčula and the mainland peninsula of Pelješac must have been like back in 1298 when the Genoese and Venetian navies were battling it out.

There aren’t too many places where you can swim almost over the top of a medieval battle site, then be ‘home’ for a shower in five minutes and a lunch in 10. Lunches or dinners on board are leisurely, as all good meals in Croatia should be.

The portside cafés and shops shut for a siesta and passengers also often disappear for a nap in the quiet of the early afternoon, especially after a three-course meal and plentiful wine.

I love cruising to Hvar and Korčula, despite their popularity, but it is Croatia’s most westerly island that has stolen my heart. Vis was once a Yugoslavian naval base and totally out of bounds to foreigners until 1989.

Because it is furthest from the mainland it doesn’t attract the same number of visitors as some of the other islands and in the town of Komiža there are still three-storey stone houses rising up straight from the sea that are unoccupied and slowly decaying.

Just above the narrow road that hugs the harbour is ‘my’ house. It has been abandoned, its walled garden overgrown its shutters sagging and stucco flaking. Illogically, unrealistically I long to own it. Inland, you can visit the reputed mountain Second World War hideout of Yugoslavian leader Tito and visit one of the wineries producing the famed red Plavac mali wine.

Just to the north-west of Dubrovnik, which lies at the far south of the Croatian Adriatic, is the island of Mljet, most of which is national park. Mljet has an island within an island. Sitting in a salt lake of warm clear water is a 12th century Benedictine monastery reached by a small ferry.

While our ship sits becalmed on a glassy sea, we visit the island, then ride bikes around the lake perimeter. Back in the port a gelato stand has opened up, I take a cherry ice cream up to the cushioned bench in our ship’s bow.

A wooden ‘galleon’ of backpackers slides in alongside of us. The rails are festooned with towels and underwear, a party already in full swing on the sundeck. You don’t need a superyacht to relish cruising the Adriatic. And, it appears, clothing on some trips might be optional too.