…and the captain's name was Vinko
SPLIT, CROATIA -- "Fucking shit" is not exactly how you want to be greeted by the captain of your five-day boat charter, but this just happened to be the case last Sunday when I left Split on the Blue Nose.
We were a group of six (seven if you count my friends' two-week-old baby), all gathered in Croatia for a wedding. We were mostly friends with the groom from a combination of living in Palo Alto, going to Stanford and working at Facebook. But we were in Croatia for the bride whose family was some kind of famous there. Like fly-a-cardinal-in-from-Italy and close-the-streets-for-a-parade kind of famous. She warned several times that the wedding would require dancing until dawn and that we would be exhausted for days. And it was her idea that we go off and explore the Croatian islands before the wedding completely wiped us out.
Less than 30 minutes after pulling away from shore, just as we sat down on the upper deck for a welcome platter of assorted meats and cheeses, the Blue Nose sailed right into a storm. Just as one of the crewmates was pouring white winefor the table and the baby started to breastfeed, things were looking very picturesque leaving the harbor. And I can imagine that on a smoother sailing day this would have been the part where the crew introduced themselves and maybe showed us where to find the life vests in case of emergency. But before we could even raise our glasses, rain started to fall out of nowhere and what started as a few small droplets quickly escalated into sheets of rain coming from all directions. As we ran for cover to the living room below deck, the sky and water had turned the same shade of intense grey.
Below deck, we helped the crew close the windows as water poured in from both upstairs and outside. The guys took turns going above deck to check on the captain and to survey the mayhem and each came back inside drenched with varying looks of terror. "Woah, it's nuts out there!" But I could tell they kind of loved it. Even as husbands and fathers, they are still trouble-loving frat boys at heart. I stayed below deck with the girls, gripping my stomach from the inside, trying not to be the first person to throw up. I remember looking over at the baby so impressed that she was still breastfeeding as if the world around her wasn't rocking to hell. If she can stay calm, so can I. Besides, boats don't really capsize, right? And shipwrecks don't happen anymore, do they? Just like turbulence on a plane, this was more of an inconvenience (our lunch went overboard), than any kind of real danger.
And then just like that, everything stopped: the shouting, the rocking, the water spraying from all directions. As quickly as it got dark and grey, the sun came back out and it was a perfectly calm summer day again. With the boat steady, the captain came downstairs soaking wet, and said in a voice that had seen its fair share of cigarettes and alcohol, "fucking shit!" That's it...just, "fucking shit!" And he poured himself a shot of rakija.
We didn't learn his name until we docked for the night. Since we had missed our grocery stop during the storm, we had pasta with canned tuna for dinner, though no one was complaining. Over shots of rakija (for everyone this time), the captain told us that in the 30 years he had been working on boats, he had never been in such a storm. The boats headlight had broken during the initial mayhem, so while we had the utmost faith in our boat and our captain sitting below deck during the storm, he actually couldn't see anything ahead of us and watched two boats on either side of us tip right into the water. He added that they were not small fishing boats, but big yachts like the ones you see with Jay Z and Beyonce (pronounced without the accent in Croatia). To think, we had been making jokes about the baby's first shipwreck, not realizing it was an actual possibility.
The rest of our days on board the Blue Nose were pretty much perfect, though much less eventful. Each day we dropped anchor in a beautiful cove to go swimming and each evening we would dock at a port for dinner. In between were naps in the sun, long sections of reading The Count of Monte Cristo, and epic games of dominoes and liar's dice with the boys.
Though we loved the boat and our crew and the majestic scenery, by our last day we were all ready to get off the boat. A few of the toilets had failed after the storm and on our last night a mouse boarded the boat; our luxury accommodations were starting to get a little makeshift. After packing our bags (careful not to accidentally stow the mouse), we all went to the upper deck where we had been where the storm hit and ate our last breakfast with the crew while sailing back towards Split.
About an hour from shore, the captains phone rang. He spoke a few words in Croatian and motioned the phone towards the table. It's for you guys. It was our tour guide and at first I thought he was calling to tell us that we needed to pay some extra hidden double fee when we arrived at port - these things happen a lot when you're traveling abroad. But it was far more serious. He had gotten word from the family and wanted to alert us right away that the wedding had been called off. Unforeseen circumstances.
We had made it through that first storm, but despite the sunny skies another one lay ahead. I have no idea what happened, nor would it be my story to tell if I did. But, "fucking shit!" The captain had been right all along.