This post starts with treason and ends with something quite the opposite of that.
My fellow sailors on the Pride Boat have spent the last week talking about setting up a confession booth on the boat. Friday morning, I woke up early and had coffee with the other two early risers and decided to just go ahead and confess things to them. Now, I’d already proven I was a traitor to the boat by making friends with our partner and rival sailboat that followed us from port to port, the Yoga Boat. I even joined them for an impromptu jam session late in the trip, doing duets with an amazing singer accompanied by a guitar. But that morning, I took my treason to the next level by confessing my sins:
- I don’t like rosé.
- I’ve only ever watched Rupaul’s Drag Race once and have no desire to watch it again.
Gay sailing camp has been an exercise in exactly that: camp. Camp is what we gays do best. Even when things go terribly wrong, as in our wig strut, it’s camp in its highest form.
While we at the Steve Simko blog are grateful for this tragic ending, we genuinely feel bad that it happened to Vance, who couldn’t have been nicer or more helpful to all of us, whether it was making sure I didn’t die on an electric bike, or always helping our skipper. Or maybe that makes it even funnier. As Vance reminded me, “it just goes to show, kindness gets you nowhere.” Of note, Vance was Canadian, which explains both his giving nature and his unique nom de plume choice of “Vance” for purposes of this blog.
The other thing we do well is bond over common enemies, real or imagined. We declared the Yoga Boat our rivals the first day and immediately bonded with each other. But later in the week, we found our true enemies, a bunch of pallid, snide gays on a yacht. We stopped in a swimming cove and they were there watching from their sunless balconies smugly bragging about how they had a bigger boat. (We would have said “at least we know how to use ours,” but judging from how generally unhelpful we were to our skipper all week, she would have called us out for saying something so patently untrue.) Then we started diving off the boat to go swimming, and unprompted they started judging our dives. Our best swimmer and diver was rated a 6. I got a 2. As they were leaving, our boat got hit by a rogue wave that caused our lunch to go flying all over the deck. We haven’t seen them since. I hoped that they ran aground, that their rosé spilled into the ocean, and that their toilets clogged. Instead they booked a nice restaurant and prevented anyone else from attending. 😡
I almost booked that trip, in which case I would have paid more than twice as much money and had less than half the fun.
I’ll reserve the rest of my reminiscences about my new friends and our onboard experiences for my journal and our group chat—I think you’ve heard the essence of what you need to know, except for one thing related to my confession. I was surprised and amazed to learn that the two early risers didn’t like rosé either. Proving the age old truth, to my relief, that the dominant group dynamic isn’t always how everyone feels.
Our sailing itinerary was this:
Day 1: arrive at 4 pm, sail to Milna for dinner. We docked overnight in the marina, as we would do most places. Milna is a small village and there wasn’t much there, but we swam and ate heavy local fare.
Day 2: sail to Hvar. Hvar is a party town frequented by 20 somethings who are either jacked on steroids, wish they were, or are dating either of the above. But we made it our own and wore all white just like none of us will be able to do at any of our own future weddings. At one bar, one of our party was served a tequila and tonic instead of a gin and tonic, and didn’t realize it until one of our party smelled it and said, “That’s not gin.”
Day 3: sail to Vis. Vis was the highlight day for me but not necessarily for everyone else. We first went on a wine tour in a decrepit Jeep with a great bumper sticker, neither of which you would see on a wine tour in Napa.
Unfortunately two of our party discovered that they were Willy Wonka characters being rolled out of the chocolate factory when things went horribly wrong. One of our group got heat exhaustion and had to be driven home from the first winery. Within a few minutes another in our group got terrible allergic conjunctivitis, and we thought the Oompa Loompas were going to roll out with a song about what happens when you don’t take your Claritin. Luckily they did recover well, although I did have to hand lavender cookies to the one with eye issues. For those of us children who survived, we had a great day with our guide Relja (there was no shortage of joy that his name was pronounced “rail ya”) who clearly knew more about RuPaul than me. The tastings were generally wonderful except for the one that required us to drive over a WWII airstrip/dirt field to access.
That night, we ate at Boccadoro, a restaurant at the only hotel on the island. For the first and possibly only time on the trip, the dinner was delicious and creative, the service was charming, witty, and engaged, and the setting was beautiful.
Day 4: Korčula. The haček, or carat over the c, is essential as it tells you to pronounce it “KORTCH-u-la” instead of “KORTS-u-la.” We found dramatic ways of pronouncing it and for no good reason found this unceasingly funny. This was the day our skipper dreaded as it was the longest day of sailing, and frankly by the time we got to Korčula I was overheated and ready to throw in the towel. But the Yoga Boat came to my rescue by regaling me with love stories and erotic poetry. OK actually it was probably the cold shower beforehand that revived me, but the stories and poetry were just too good. It was our first dinner not together as a group, which actually facilitated more revealing conversation among the three of us who traveled there solo.
Day 5 and 6: National Park and fishing village. This was the chill part of the trip, and besides me almost dying on a gravel bike path and Vance coming to my rescue, not a lot actually happened, but we saw some pretty things. Not gonna lie, I was ready to get to land and sleep in a bed by this point.
Day 7: Finally! Dubrovnik. More on that later.
I’ve felt that being on a sailboat is analogous to backpacking in a lot of ways. You have to conserve water, for instance. Showers on the boat are limited to two minutes. Also managing toilet paper is unpleasant—you can’t flush it. Most of us steadfastly avoided pooping on the boat because, you know, gay pride or shame or some combination of the two. I did it three times and am not worse for the experience, but I won’t speak for how my boatmates felt about that.
For sleep, you share a tight cabin with someone—in my case, it’s essentially like sharing a full bed, not even a queen, with a stranger. At least my roommate smelled OK and was tidy (and more than that, made me laugh harder than anyone on the boat). But it was hard to maintain good sleep quality.
One beautiful thing sailing that reminds me of backpacking is the stars. Last year, I spent a glorious week backpacking with friends in Washington. A couple of nights, we stayed in a cabin to which you could only backpack. You had shelter, stoves, cots, a few provisions, but not much more. They helicopter in a pallet of firewood every year. And at night, you could see so many stars, and the faint waves of the Milky Way subtly wafting like clouds behind them. You can see it on the water here too. When we were in Hvar, we needed to take a water taxi back to our boat in a separate marina. And out over the black waters you could see it all, just like in the mountains of Washington or any time I’ve ever been backpacking far from light pollution. Last night, lying on the bow of the boat, I watched the stars for about 45 minutes through the stack of masts in the marina, and shooting stars started creeping in to our vision. Like backpacking, you get to see things sailing you can’t normally see.
A week on a sailboat in hot weather with no wind (and thus no actual sailing) was more tiring than I expected. To cool off, you have to expend energy by swimming. OK maybe some in the group who are better swimmers don’t feel like they’re expending energy, but I do. Heat saps you of your energy too.
Until the last day or two, I didn’t feel trapped or stuck at all because we were so busy going from place to place. But as I felt so trapped during the pandemic literally and metaphorically, I got tired of depending on a single vessel all the time and was getting desperate for my freedom to travel and sleep and shit where I want.
The general consensus on our boat is that Croatians exaggerate their accomplishments in the world. They’re quick to claim Marco Polo and Nikola Tesla as their own even though they were merely born here. One person on our boat noted that they heard a tour guide say the stone in the White House came from Croatia, when in fact it came from Virginia and Maryland. When you’re a new country struggling with the existential threat of massive brain drain—the Croatian population has dropped by 10% since joining the EU, as hundreds of thousands have left seeking work elsewhere—you have to take wins where you can get them.
I don’t have a lot of superlatives to say about Croatia as a country beyond the beautiful landscape. The wine has been of variable quality, the food has mostly uninteresting (only one memorable meal, most of the rest ordinary and repetitive—you can only eat so much cevapi and lightly seasoned fish). People haven’t been outgoing or friendly except for our server at the one memorable meal. As a traveler, it’s like a more expensive Greece but with largely inaccessible culture. I came here to sail and to meet new people and to experience the islands, and I got that, but I can’t say much for Croatia as a country other than it’s proud and struggling and that I wish it a brighter future.
That doesn’t mean Croatia isn’t lovable. My only tie to Croatia before now was being there in person for their first national sporting truimph as an independent country, winning the Olympic gold medal in team handball at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. 30,000 people were there on that last day of the Olympics in the Georgia Dome, and I still get goosebumps and even tear up a little thinking about how rapturously happy the players and Croatian fans were after having just won independence a few years earlier after a war against a brutal aggressor. That’s the Croatia I’ll always remember, perhaps even more strongly than these beautiful islands that I recommend you sail someday. And the lesson here is that trying to love a place that isn’t your home, warts and all, can bring you a lot of joy. It might even be a virtue.
Steve Simko 