My first official day as a Sail Croatia tour leader and it started with a manic check in, in a raining Split for six boats. It may as well have been for Top Deck, Contiki, Travel Talk and Bus About too as their reps were nowhere to be found and Janice and I kept having to tell these people where to go. It was basically a morning of standing in the rain, giving directions, clambering over boats….and me dropping my clipboard overboard!

I was the first to get all my guests together, so Graeme climbed on board to listen to my welcome speech. I had come on earlier and gotten all the crews names so I could introduce them to the passengers. I have Captain Denes (Denis), Chef Marion, Waiter, Erik and my Sailors are Mario and Raiko. They are all nice guys from the north of Croatia, not from Dalmatia like the crew on Mlini the boat I had just come from. I looked around after I had finished my welcome speech and Graeme was gone. I gave him a call and he said, Sorry I wasn't there for your whole speech I didn't want your boat to leave with me on it and you looked like you had it well under control anyway. You can go if you want. If I want? This is my decision? Ok, Denes let's go!

And so we set sail for Hvar, the supposed sunniest place in Croatia, I told my twelve passengers. Hopefully, we would have better luck with the weather there. It wasn't far to go and we arrived in three hours. I gave my welcome to Hvar speech and then booked a restaurant for the night. I then had to wait for Janice to collect her printer off my boat as she is becoming one of the reps for Hvar. I sat in the square and people watched for most of the afternoon and patted stray dogs, I ran into Bobo, who continually tried to chat me up…their boat is following the same route as us this week.

I met my group at Marinero's restaurant and had a lovely meal of fried calamari before taking them back to the boat for happy hour before going to Nautica bar. Janice was already there all dressed up with the other boats and my lot didn't really seem like they wanted to go out. I was just about to give up on the whole idea when Bobo, Zvorne and Toni turned up. Toni gave me a fist bump and I danced with Bobo for a bit before they took off and I went back to my boat.