After rounding the north coast of an island called Cres (the most northerly point of our whole sailing trip!), we reluctantly started heading south again, knowing that our time in Croatia was coming to an end. On the southbound journey we took the opportunity to visit some places we'd missed on the way up, including a few islands which were off limits to visitors until the late 80s and were therefore heralded as unspoilt by tourism - a more accurate statement might be that exposure has been limited to modern tourism which seems to be more focused on ice cream and olive oil than it is on high-rise resorts. Definitely a big improvement but we've found that most of Croatia fell in this camp.

An unexpected benefit of heading south was fewer thunderstorms. After a couple of nights' broken sleep, the weather settled down and we were looking forward to a quiet night on a tiny (we were able to walk halfway around it) island called Prvic. Unfortunately a bar in the little bay we'd anchored in happened to be celebrating something that night and the "live music till 4am" proclaimed on the sign outside was no understatement. At least the band was good!

In early August we found ourselves back in Trogir to pick up more visitors - Gerard's brother Vincent and his girlfriend Sara. They brought us a lot of luck with the wind and weather and we had some amazing sailing days, much of the time spent in open water where they dealt very well with waves that hit about 2m. We had a really fun week with them: we took our dinghy to investigate an abandoned submarine bunker on Vis, walked up to the second oldest lighthouse in Croatia on Lastovo (quite the landmark!), cycled round the lakes on Mljet, saw a massive tuna leap out of the water (didn't know they did that), and Vincent caught us our first ever squid (which unfortunately managed to escape in an inky mess before we could get it aboard or take photos). We left them in Cavtat - where we'd arrived in the country almost 12 weeks earlier - and set off that afternoon for Montenegro.

I had high hopes for Montenegro (largely based on scenes from Casino Royale which it turns out is all filmed in the Czech Republic) and this is perhaps where I went wrong. We both felt a bit disappointed by the places we visited - in contrast to Croatia, Montenegro seems to have very much embraced old school tourism and there are a lot of ugly hotels dotted along the coast. We did see some nice places: Kotor was lovely and Budva had some charm, but overall we were not that impressed. Having said that, we had intended to rent a car and spend a day inland but our time in Montenegro was cut short by a wind forecast giving us a 2 day window to get down to Greece if we wanted to avoid 36 hours on engine (we did). So maybe there's more to Montenegro and we missed it - or perhaps it never stood a chance after the sailing paradise that is Croatia.