The gulet — a traditional wooden sailing vessel originating from the Aegean, now the definitive craft of the Adriatic summer — is not merely a means of transport. It is the correct answer to a specific question: how do you experience the Dalmatian islands without the compromises that conventional travel imposes?
Chartered with a full crew of three — captain, deckhand, cook — and configured for a maximum of eight guests, the wooden gulet produces a form of travel that is genuinely unlike anything else. You wake to a different anchorage each morning. The itinerary exists, but it responds: to weather, to a cove noticed from the upper deck, to the suggestion of a local fisherman encountered in a small harbour. Nothing is rigid. Everything is considered.
The Route: Split to Korčula
We begin in Split — private transfer from the airport directly to the marina, boarding before the evening light fades from Diocletian’s Palace. The first night is spent at anchor in a bay on the island of Šolta, twelve nautical miles from the city but entirely removed from it.
Day two brings Brač — specifically the village of Bol, and the extraordinary beach at Zlatni Rat, which changes shape with the tides and currents. We arrive by tender at 8am, before the day visitors from the ferry. The beach belongs to us for two hours. By the time the crowds arrive, we have already moved on.
Vis — the island farthest from the mainland, and for decades a restricted military zone — retains a quality of quiet that more accessible islands have lost. The town of Komiža, on the western coast, has one of the finest small restaurants in the Adriatic: a place with six tables, no printed menu, and a cook who works exclusively with what the morning’s fishing and the kitchen garden provide. We have a standing reservation.
Hvar for sundowners. Korčula — Marco Polo’s alleged birthplace — for the final two nights, with time to walk the old town at dawn before the return transfer to Dubrovnik Airport.
What the Crew Provides
Breakfast is served on deck each morning at whatever hour guests prefer. The cook produces a lunch that changes daily — grilled fish from the morning market, local vegetables, bread baked on board. Dinner is sometimes on the boat, sometimes arranged ashore at a restaurant that we have reserved in advance. The captain knows every anchorage, every shortcut, every bay that the charter routes miss.
The crew does not intrude. This is a household skill, and a difficult one — to be present without being present, to anticipate without assuming. The families we work with have been doing this for decades.
