Boat maintenance and the charter company
I was very impressed by the state of the catamaran ‘ No Shoes ‘ and the general maintenance level – very impressive! Especially compared to our boat and base in the Seychelles, unfortunately.
We met with Davor, the DYC Pula base manager and had a briefing both by him and his employees – in the office and on the boat. It was extremely thorough. They went through all systems (apart from the water maker – but we did not need it).
Of course, you can always do more in terms of explaining systems, instruments and sailing techniques. But I think the expectation is that people have sailed a cat before and know how to handle the systems. If that is the case, no further explanations are needed!
No Shoes easily sailed 5-6 knots by the sails in around 10-12 knots of wind. Very relaxing and the boat was easy to handle.
She held anchor well I would say… We had two places where she was dragging a bit but we just put out more chain and sorted it. But a slightly larger anchor would be my choice.
One thing that surprised me was the factory solar setup! It did an amazing job and kept 100% of our power supply through the 20 days – without running the generator! We only ran the generator 2 hours to supply A/C on the hottest 2 days to cool down the cabins so the kids could sleep. The house battery bank never went under 12,4 volts.
Sailing trip across Northern Italy and Croatia
We are a family of four – two kids age 4 and 2. For the first 10 days of this holiday, we were joint by another couple and their son so there were a total of 7 people onboard.
During these first 10 days we sailed up along the Istrian coast visiting the beautiful and historical towns of Rovinj and Umag while taking lunch stops and snorkel breaks in wonderful bays along the way.
After efficiently clearing out of Croatia in Umag, we checked into Italy and stopped in Trieste, one of our favourite cities! With such a variety of food and wine on offer, its hard to know when to stop.
Absolutely a recommendable destination for sailing and a convenient Marina. Great access to delicious Italian provisioning at “Eatalia” right by the Marina.
Onwards to Grado – a beautiful Lido-covered Italian summer town with a unique city canal where you can sail through a narrow canal, all the way into the heart of the city and dock right by great restaurants and shops (see top picture). Amazing experience!
During these harbour stops it really became evident how easy it is to manage a catamaran when you get comfortable in manouvering the boat only using the engines to guide the two hulls around. You can really turn and dock the Helia 44 with very little space available. Best practiced in open water first though! Of note here is that on the Helia, the rudders sit in-front of the propellers, so there is some flow over the rudders when in reverse.
After Grado, we took off at 4 AM and existed the city channel in dawn on our journey towards a bucket list item: Venice. The trip was incredibly comfortable – though we didn’t have much wind the following week.
On the other hand though, when motoring we found No Shoes to be very economic and stable when just using a single engine going 1750 rpm at 5 knots – just using 2-2.5 l/h.
Arriving in Venice was such a joy – the most beautiful city to enter as all life takes place on the water. Any sailor really needs to go here at least once in life. We were lucky to find space in Marina Sant’Elena at the most eastern end of the Venice.
This was perfect as we could walk into the city without needing to cross any water. We had a couple of very memorable days in Venice – again eating too much good food!
In Italy – as well as in Croatia – we anchored in front of several beaches and here you could really feel the qualities of the catamaran – fantastic stability even in swell, low draft and a perfect liveaboard platform for the entire crew to relax, snorkel, cook delicious food and hang out.
Following Venice, we crossed back to Pula, Croatia, where we dropped off our guests and continued as a family of four for the remaining 10 days.
We sailed south of the Istria peninsula and circumnavigated Cres islands. Some of our stopovers – in addition to a couple of stunning, natural anchorages: Valun (Cres), Krk town (Krk), Rab town (Rab), Nerezine (Losinj) and Osor (Cres).
Two places stood out: Valun, a cosy small-town with beach atmosphere and stern-to mooring right by the town restaurants and Rab, where we anchored in the bay right by the forest but with easy access to the historic town.
But do not cheat yourself for those hundreds of great anchorages around these islands!
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With a future plan of sailing around the world as a family, it was very valuable to handle the boat ourselves and experience that with good guidelines, planning and skills this was completely manageable.
All instruments and systems make the boat very easy to single or double-hand – especially with the autopilots wind-hold function and remote windlass controls at the helm.
Once you get to know all of these systems and comfortable with certain routines, everything is easy sailing including harbour manoeuvres, as long as you don’t have too much wind from the side.
And as long as something else doesn’t go sideways.
On that note, we must say that this was probably our best sailing holiday yet – in the sense that we have zero incidents – which definitely isn’t a given when sailing. Three things made our trip on ‘No Shoes’ highly successful:
- A highly capable, incredibly comfortable and easy to manage boat,
- The absolutely wonderful and relatively easy to sail waters of Croatia and Italy, and
- Our experience, communication, collaboration and planning as a crew.
We can strongly recommend a similar trip to anyone else onboard ‘No Shoes’. A huge thanks to the owner, Nils, for making his boat available.
All the best,
Daniel and Tamira
Hi Daniel, thank you so much for this fantastic article. Sounds like you had a great holiday and I can’t wait to follow your trip. I haven’t done that Northern route myself yet.
I am very please that ‘No Shoes’ has been looked after so well by Davor and his Pula Team . It’s always a pleasure to have a fellow owner on the boat.
As promised, for a review on ‘No Shoes’, I will send you one of our special Crew Shirts as a thank you…. as soon as I have another batch of ‘M’ sizes made.
Cheers Nils