David's Diary: Sunday, September 8, 2002

Luka Rogacic, Croatia

The kids did not want to swim in the bay in Vis Town as they all felt that it didn't look clean enough. Tony, skipper of Ganymede, and I looked over the charts and we found a small anchorage that is just outside the large entrance into the bay at Vis Town. We untied the two boats and Charlie joined us for the thirty minute sail to Luka Rogacic. If you put two sailboats together and both of them are sailing, then what you have is a race. We had a friendly sail and I took the opportunity to take some pictures of Ganymede under sail. It is rare to get a picture of you sailing your own sailboat, so I was glad that I could get some pictures for Tony and Maggie.

Nada

Dragonsinger went first into the bay. The outer portion looked too deep, but after exploring the inner portion we decided that it was too shallow and narrow for both boats so Ganymede dropped their anchor in the outer bay. As we were concentrating on pulling up alongside Ganymede someone from shore kept calling out "Are you really Canadian?" Not wanting to break our concentration we just waved and shouted that yes we were.

Petar

To make sure that we stayed place in the small anchorage, I took a stern line from Ganymede to shore. As I tied the end to the cement quay a woman came up to me. Nada was from Vancouver and I had just tied Ganymede's stern line to her dock. Neither of us could believe the coincidence.

Nada and her husband Petar are from Croatia. Nada is originally from Vis Town and she still has family that live there. Her husband Petar was originally from Split, but they immigrated to Canada in the early 1960s. Petar trained as a doctor and he had just retired from St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver as an orthopaedic surgeon. We compared notes and discovered that their house in Vancouver is only a kilometer or two from ours.

Ganymede and Dragonsinger

Nada and Petar invited Karalee and I up to their summer house. They have four grown children and every year since they left Croatia Nada has come back to Vis Town with the children for the summer. Even when Vis was off limits to tourists because of its naval base, even during the war years in the early nineties, Nada still made the trip back to her hometown. This summer Petar has been here for three months rather than the usual two or three weeks that he has spent in the past. It was interesting to hear their stories and learn more about them as we looked down at Ganymede and Dragonsinger at anchor from their balcony.