A bad day in the Med is better than a good day in the UK

As Margaret has posted Monday was a bit of a non event. The prospect of sailing South East would have been a bit of a mission rather than a pleasure, so a quiet day on board and a pleasant stroll ashore took precedence. We did not have any 3G last night so today is a bit of a catch up.
Those familiar with Practical Boat Owner will know they run a series of articles on clever modifications that owners make to their boats. This is usually impressive bits of engineering such as a pop up workshop that arises from the bilge of the boat complete with vice and lathe or fitting an automatic man over board retrieval device. Here is the best innovation I have made. It is a chopping board that fits into the inset of the sink.
Margaret very cleverly measured up the sink during our last trip and I was tasked with finding a bit of wood in the garage that would do the trick. It works perfectly - you can wash veg etc, chop it up and jettison the detritus straight into the undersink bin. In particular it does not slide all over the place while underway. I thoroughly recommend this. I may even send it to PBO.
In complete contrast here is Margaret's best effort at innovation. A pair of specs tied to the binnacle with a bit of string and thread. Pikey or what!

One of my literary ambitions has been to write up my experience of things that have gone wrong on sailing trips. This would be a massive work. However much of it would be frankly unbelievable and there would be a significant risk of accusations of developing apocryphal tales. I have discussed doing this endlessly with John Baxter. It then struck me that the reason for this is that he has been involved in every catastrophe. In fact when he is not present things generally go smoothly and without incident. I will have to mull over the reasons for this relationship. Causal or just coincidence?

Yesterday the wind direction altered by 60 degrees to South to South West which provided a nice point of sail. We covered around 26 nm mostly on a single tack right to our destination. This was a small coastal village, Okuklje, on the island of Mljet. It was pretty much perfect sailing, mostly upwind with 10-20 knots and a fairly slight sea. Thoroughly enjoyable.
As it turned out we had been to Okuklje some 8 years ago on a Flotilla holiday. We moored up stern to a somewhat rickety jetty under the direction of the "Marinero" ashore during quite a brisk crosswind. It turned out there is fierce competition between 3 or 4 restaurants in the bay. The deal being that if you moore on their jetty you eat at their restaurant.
Our lot had cheekily built this new rickety affair close to the entrance to the bay in order to be the first seen by entering yachts and were clearly taking the vast majority of the trade.
In the end this all worked out well. The Maestral restaurant is a family concern with brother and sister running the operation and their nephew is the recruiter on the shore and also the chef. I have to admit the standard of food was excellent and well above the standard fare, as was the price.
I remembered this pair form our previous visit and the lady owner stated she remembered me. Apparently a face so unusual that once seen it cannot be forgotten (uproarious laughter from Margaret).

Today we had quite a short trip to do towards Dubrovnic.Again the wind had returned to the South East, i.e. on the nose. However we manfully tacked all the way up the Mljet Kanal for about 15nm into quite a brisk breeze. This did give the opportunity of testing our upwind performance. As you can see we managed 6.2 knots over the ground with 16 knots of apparent wind at 40 degrees to the wind - not bad.
We ended up in a sheltered bay on the North side of an island just West of the city.


Bob Redfern had at one point intended to join us for a part of this trip but is not now able to do so.
He wanted some further photos of the boat, so here are some. A bit difficult to get the whole boat in when you are on it however Bob.

So we are now looking forward to round 2 of the polystyrene ball bag chilli. I have to admit this was a great success. The green lentils are slightly al dente but the somewhat wooden carrots are well cooked, something I did not achieve previously with 40 minutes of cooking on gas. Meat would cook really well in this.A highly recommended sailing device.

The last 4 or 5 days have had southerly winds, in contrast to the normal prevailing North Westerly. This Southerly wind is known as the Sirocco or Jugo.  It consists of warm air coming from the Sahara and picks up moisture on the way- hence rain.The humidity of the air itself is quite extra-ordinary and your skin feels sticky all the time. In old Yugoslavian law after 4 days of Jugo crimes of passion, murder etc, were mitigated.
We are almost at that point but there has been a change today and I think more settled weather is ahead.
Congrats and thanks to Rennie Logan for the signals answer below. I am sure as an expert he knew it before looking it up, but I didn't.

Signs – From them, lights as below, subject to lengths; Day shapes: Two black balls separated by black diamond;