Travel with Indigo

Here is reputed to be the culinary center of Croatia. Its wines, while surely adequate, are not up to the standards of the southern regions around Hvar and Dubrovnik, but its cuisine is superb. While I was there, the truffle season was at its peak. Sniffed out by trained dogs, these tasty fungi, both black and white, grow all over central Istria. Any restaurant will add them to a dish at modest cost.

In the central part of the peninsula, it seems that atop nearly every hill is yet another old town. One features artists, another features musicians and another fine food and local wines. When not catering to wandering tourists, these sleepy villages are devoted to harvesting grapes, hunting truffles and cultivating orchards. Even during the season, tourists are far fewer than on the coasts and fully clothed too. I visited Buzet, Motovun, Buje and Groznjan and liked them all quite a lot but having visited them I have no desire to return.

With considerable effort and the aid of Google Maps, I also located the miniature medieval villages of Hum, Roc and Kotli, which believe me, are hard to find. The first of these is said to be the smallest town in the world, a claim of dubious merit. Within its walls three rows of houses, several of which are now shops, divide two parallel streets. The second village is unremarkable and the third has a current population of one, according to the latest census.

On the peninsula’s west coast, I headed north into Slovenia, just because I had never been there and stayed several nights in one of the finest hotels I have ever encountered, The Palace, a magnificent refurbishment of a classic old hotel in the resort town of Portoroz. Just up the highway is the Italian port city of Trieste.

Slovenia is obviously richer than Croatia, with a claimed GDP per capita of nearly $30,000 against Croatia’s $18,000. It also still harbors animosity for its immediate neighbor left over from the Yugoslav Wars. Nobody would convert Croatian currency, called kunas, into Euros, and each time I asked, a clerk turned me down with a polite disdain as if it bore disease.

Across the street from my hotel is a beach facing a bay off the Northern Adriatic, which on its street side is lined with touristy shops, bars and restaurants and on its bay side with beach chairs arranged in a grid seven rows deep from the water spaced three feet apart. The chairs rent by the hour to anyone wishing to sunbathe among a thicket of others.

I next drove south along the Istrian coast through all of the resort towns along the way before arriving at Rovinj (Row-veen). My hotel there, called Monte Mulini, is new, modern and nicely sited on a hill sloping gently to a placid bay and a short walk away from the town’s exceptionally large and fine old town.

The hotel’s best feature, however, is its immediate proximity to one of the finest public parks I have yet encountered anywhere. The park is enormous, covered in old growth forest and interlaced with pedestrian paths along which are spaced inviting, tree shaded bars and restaurants. Its seaside walk, about two miles long, twists and winds around the craggy shore and is a constant parade of locals and tourists. Some come for a favorite swimming spot, some to ride bikes but most, like me, are there just for a quiet, contemplative stroll among natural beauty.

Croatia is full of these parks, begun I believe in Tito’s time but continued, enlarged and improved thereafter. There is scarcely a waterfront anywhere in the country that is without its pedestrian-only sea walk. The notion that the owner of waterfront private property has the right to exclude the public from walking along the shore is foreign here. If there is a salutary remnant of the former Yugoslav Republic, this may be it.

On a day trip, I drove to Pula and there did a drive-by sighting of its notable attraction, the sixth largest Roman amphitheater in the world with a seating capacity back then of 20,000. It really is impressive and is the site of frequent concerts during the summer. In the same place gladiators once entertained crowds, Simply Red, Nora Jones and Placido Domingo perform in concert.

Mechanical Problems [Chick Alert: Boy Stuff Follows]

So far, I have declined to say just why we spent nearly four months in one place, a time during which the summer season in the Med was at its prime. The reason, as nearly always with boats, was mechanical and revealed the extraordinary complexity of a vessel’s seemingly commonplace propulsion system.

Since I bought the boat about six years ago, she has had what I considered excessive vibration coming from one of the propeller shafts. Periodically over that period, competent engineers and technicians examined her carefully but the source of the problem continued to evade discovery.

Fate, always prolific of incident and noting that I fervently wished to cruise the Med in summer, chose to intervene, as she invariably does, at the worst possible time. The vibration worsened just as the season began. Hoping finally to resolve the nagging problem, we took Indigo to a well-regarded shipyard in Sibenik, had her hauled out and, in the desultory way of the Croatian work force, began searching for the source of the now more worrisome vibration.

Using a time tested but decidedly primitive method, the yard to their everlasting credit solved the mystery. The propeller shaft on the port side, a shaft that connects the transmission to the prop, was out of alignment. Now it might occur to you to ask why such an apparently simple defect was not found sooner. It certainly occurred to me. The reason it was not was the astonishingly (to me) small measurement that separates flaw from perfection. Until that distance worsened, the flaw was very nearly undetectable. Then again, the Croatian yard was diligent, if slow, and found what others had not.

Alignment was askew at the prop end of the shaft by just 4.6 millimeters on the vertical plane and .8 on the horizontal. For the metrically unskilled, that is .18 of an inch (half the thickness of an iPhone 4G without case) and .03 of an inch (about the thickness of a one page Christmas card)! Further testing revealed that at the transmission end of the shaft alignment was out by a single millimeter (.039 of an inch). Now, to put these trifling numbers into perspective, consider that the distance from the forward end of the shaft to the prop is 20 feet, the shaft itself is 4.3 inches in diameter and the engine and transmission weigh more than four tons. That such minuscule imperfection in the context of such stout machinery could bring a vessel to a halt, and even damage some parts of the assembly, was astounding.

If the tolerances are small, the exertions required to correct them were not. At the transmission end, the entire port engine and transmission were moved precisely one millimeter. I remain astonished that such an adjustment was even possible, let alone necessary. To make the adjustment, a vibration damping bed of epoxy, called Chock Fast, had to be chipped away, and when the alignment was corrected, re-poured and hardened.

At the prop end, the correction work was even more demanding. Just before it reaches the prop, the shaft passes through a steel housing affixed to the end of a strut connected to the hull. Inside the housing, a sleeve machined from solid brass is bolted firmly in place, and within that sleeve is a rubber bearing, encasing and affixed to the shaft, called a cutlass bearing, that turns with the shaft.

To make the correcting miniature adjustment, a foundry fabricated a new sleeve by pouring a solid cylinder of new brass 18 inches long and 9 inches in diameter that when cured was drilled off center so that the hole accommodating the shaft and cutlass bearing was perfectly aligned, correcting the flaw.

What I have just described succinctly is a highly simplified version of the work actually done. For example, there are really three cutlass bearings and each was out of alignment by different amounts and on different planes. Altogether, the repairs required more than three months’ work by a team of specialists, who stopped and measured their progress frequently to near microscopic detail. It was excruciatingly tedious but ultimately precise and solved the long nagging problem. That is why I spent a great deal of time in the Balkans. I also liked the country a lot.

Upon returning to Split, I promptly planned my next excursion by car, this one to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Hercegovina, site of a horrific four-year siege during the Yugoslav Wars and the subject of the next blog.