Refit #1: Customs & the Boat Yard

Meeting Serenity First

When I arrived in Croatia this week, it was actually my first time seeing Serenity First. Sure, I’d heard loads about her, but, even though she’s registered under my name, I hadn’t technically laid eyes on her yet.

But what a sight for sore eyes she was! Especially after the airline had lost all my bags…

She had spent the winter thus far about half an hour’s drive from Split in Marina Baotić (it turns out this is pronounced “BOW-tich,” which we learned after getting many blank stares asking about “bay-O-tick.” #learningcroatian #hopeless). Our goals for this week were to take her over to the main harbour in Split to finalise the change of ownership with customs, and then to get her to the boat yard on the north side of the Split peninsula where she’d be hauled out for the refit.

I had a couple of days to prep the boat and learn my way around before Alec was scheduled to join me, with the intended plan being we’d cast off immediately on his arrival to take the boat round the coast to Split. We had scheduled our customs appointment for early the following morning, so we wanted to spend the night as close to their office as possible. But when Alec turned up we unfortunately discovered all the things I forgot to check: did we have propane (nope), did we know where we were going (also nope), and had we tested and done a full engine check (errr, oops?). Ensue mad scramble to prep the boat and cast off in time to get around to Split harbour before dark!

We made it round, and, not wanting to pay to moor for the night, initially tied up in the ferry terminal (I agree in retrospect this wasn’t one of our best plans). There we oddly ran into a lovely Aussie chap, Tony, who’d just bought a boat from the same broker as us – very small world? Anyway, unsurprisingly, leaving the boat on the ferry dock overnight proved too uncertain for our psyches, so we soon moved across to the town quay.

Customs – the export / import process

*Disclaimer: the following story is for entertainment purposes only and may include fictitious events or statements

In order to finalise transfer of the boat’s ownership to us, we had to first check it out of Croatia and confirm its sale and deletion from the Croatian flag to customs. Then we could check back in under its new registration. The letter of the rules say that the process to do is as follows: 1. export the boat from customs, 2. sail it out to international waters (12 nautical miles offshore of the furthest bit of Croatian land, which due to all the islands is actually about 25-30 nautical miles out from Split), 3. lower the Croatian flag and hoist the new flag, and 4. return to customs to re-import the boat under its new flag and ownership.

Now, I’m going to be very honest here, we had absolutely no intention of sailing out to international waters. It being winter, the weather was, perhaps unsurprisingly, unfriendly to a journey out into open water (even if it is just the Adriatic…). The forecast was for 20-25 knots of ‘breeze’ with gusts well above 30, and relatively big seas. Plus it was cold! Alec and I are fair weather sailors; we are not even vaguely interested in going out in 5 degrees C with gusts of 30 knots. Especially with no propane to make hot drinks. Given that we didn’t have a tracking system on board (this was before we installed AIS – more on what that system does in a future post), we figured there was no way for the customs officials to actually check where we’d been unless they made someone follow us – and it seemed extremely unlikely that would be worth their while. So, our real plan was to motor out and around the headland towards the protected bay west of Trogir, where we’d find a nice spot to anchor for the night. Then we’d returning to customs the following morning having been away for an appropriate length of time for us to feasibly have been out to international waters and back. Frankly we assumed that this was what most people did and that it would be a bit of a wink-nudge deal.

BUT (you knew there’d be a ‘but’), our initial plan was soon scuppered. One of the many bureaucratic hoops to jump through in the customs process involves going down to the harbormaster’s office to get them to sign off that you are competent enough to sail the boat and have appropriate insurance. I was chatting with the harbormaster while waiting for the paperwork when he casually mentioned that, if we didn’t have a tracking system, we would need to take a picture of our GPS readout when we made it to international waters to prove to customs that we’d actually done it.

Damn you, modern technology.

In a total panic, I sent Alec to start plotting a course for how we’d actually make the journey, because I now couldn’t see any way of getting around it. So, new plan – we head out to the edge of Croatian land that day, anchor in a bay overnight, then get up at the crack of to make the final leg out to international waters before turning round and getting back to Split for mid-afternoon the second day. Alec managed to find a good place near the town of Maslinica on the island of Šolta to be our pit stop for the night that was really well protected from the nasty weather. And it looked like, with a little luck, there would be a just-about-long-enough weather window very early the second morning when we could sprint out to international waters and back before the really big winds (and seas) started to properly build. So, downtrodden but not defeated, we finished the export formalities at customs (with many Kuna spent in fees…) and headed for open water. Thankfully we also managed to borrow some propane from another yacht for the journey – otherwise we may have really lost our sense of humour.

The pit stop Alec had found was indeed wonderfully well protected. We basically went about as far up this creek as we could without grounding the boat and then dropped anchor (and eventually also our kedge off the stern, to stop us swinging out to the sides of the creek). It was a beautiful little anchorage, which we had to ourselves for the night, and the sun even came out for a bit. We took the opportunity of this brief period of calm to try our hand at putting up the headsail (no problem! So much easier than on training boats…), and cranked up the Webasto heating on board to get things really cosy. We kept checking the weather, and it looked like our little window was going to hold for the following morning, so we went to sleep feeling quite proud of ourselves and determined to kick this journey’s butt in the AM.

The overhead blind in our cabin, the forepeak, was missing (one of the many things that needed upgrading during the re-fit!), and the moon that night was very bright. About 2am, it aligned itself spectacularly well with our hatch and the brightness woke both Alec and I. Unable to go back to sleep, it seemed the smart thing to do would be to check the forecast to make sure it hadn’t changed. Many alarm bells began ringing in our heads as we discovered–you might have guessed this–our weather window had entirely disappeared. In fact, it was already blowing +20 knots outside of our protected spot, and it would only get worse for the next two days…

We immediately held crisis talks. Should we risk going out in bad weather in a boat we didn’t know very well? Or risk going back to customs without a photo and hope they took our word for it? Neither was appealing. We went back and forth for about an hour before I made an offhand comment about how I wished I’d had my laptop with me, because if I did I could just photoshop a picture of our GPS with the desired coordinates. I was mostly joking, but Alec sat bolt upright and latched on to this idea with both hands. Many approaches were discussed. We could sail around the back of the Split headland, Alec could drop me off secretly and I could run to our rented apartment, grab my laptop, make the photo and run back to the boat in time for us to sail back around to the customs office, probably without being noticed. But, we couldn’t come up with a practical way to do this that didn’t have some unacceptable level of risk (of being caught or of running out of time and ending up out in terrible weather in the dark). Next, we went through every app on every device that we did have on board to see if we could find some way of doing this in situ. It was then that Alec discovered, in a forgotten corner of his iPad, the Pixelmater app. Much feverish testing showed that it did indeed just about have enough capabilities for me to make a passable photoshopping job. About 5am, we finally, nervously, went back to sleep resolved that I would photoshop the picture while Alec navigated us back to Split through the weather in the morning. To minimise the work, we figured out a spot on the chart (and a time) we could get to that would mean I only needed to change 4 numbers on the GPS readout.

We left the anchorage about 8:30am, and managed to hoist the US flag when protected from anyone’s view by the islands (as if we’d been to international waters). It was a fairly roll-y journey and I had literally every single one of my brain cells concentrated on my photoshopping task; so, I was fighting seasickness while poor Alec was fighting the freezing rain on deck – we were a very sorry duo. It was a tense morning, but we finally pulled into the customs pier about noon, image in hand, praying it worked.

I was genuinely shaking walking into the customs building to check in. And… they didn’t even ask to see the photo. The conversation went:

Customs official: “Did you go ‘out’ out?”

Me: “Yes, we went out to international waters.”

Customs official: “Okay, great.”

WHAT?? Fine. I’m over it. If we hadn’t made the image, they would have asked. But I’m keeping it forever in homage to this ludicrous experience.

Having successfully and with literally no issue re-imported the boat under the new flag and ownership (just a few more fees…), we finally motored the boat an hour round the headland to the boat yard where she would be living for the next couple of months while we did the refit. Parking was an interesting experience on their partially sunken and mostly not attached to the shore piers. At one particularly bad point I was stranded on an unattached pier (the one you can see in front of the boat in the below image) while Alec and the boat chased our escaped fenders around. But, eventually I managed to scramble back aboard at an opportune moment, and with the help (“help”) of the boat yard manager, Zeljko, we eventually got somewhat securely tied off (mostly by tying to other boats that were on the shore and random rocks). The coordinator at the yard, Ana, also told us we needed to cover the old boat name and write the new boat name in case of inspection. You can see the excellent job we did of this in the picture below. Duct tape is one of my preferred media, and I think this is some of my finer artistry.

To end this crazy week, we went out to celebrate at a very fancy cocktail / pizza restaurant on the harbour. Even at such a nice place, the pizzas were only £10 each! Low season + Eastern Europe = excellent prices. Though I think actually the cocktails might have cost more than the pizzas…

In any case, we successfully (?) completed our goals for the week, with a few additional grey hairs being the only real lasting damage :).