Croatia has a fixed image abroad: Split, Hvar, Vis and the Blue Cave. I wrote an episode of this series about exactly that and I take none of it back — but that is the south, and that is the version of Croatia for people who want to go out in the evening. North of Split lies an entirely different cruising ground: the Zadar and Šibenik archipelagos, where three hundred kilometres of coast hold several hundred islands, most of them uninhabited, two national parks directly on the route and a third one a few miles up a river. There is no nightlife there, and that is rather the point. This time the boat was M/Y KNITWEAR.CLUB3 — a 2025 Absolute Navetta 64, nineteen and a half metres: six guests in three double cabins, each with its own bathroom, skipper and hostess included in the rate, teak decks, a large flybridge and a full-beam saloon on the main deck. A navetta is a hull built not to race but to be comfortable underway — you run at twelve or fourteen knots and you finally start looking at the shore instead of at your watch. We boarded at D-Marin Marina Dalmacija in Sukošan and headed north, to Zadar.
Day 1 — Zadar and a first evening beside the Sea Organ
Embarkation at Sukošan → Zadar, the old town → the city quay
We came aboard in the early afternoon and an hour later we were lying in Zadar. It is a city almost nobody puts on a must-see list, and quite unfairly so: a Roman forum lying open, set straight into the paving of the square, the Romanesque church of St Donatus built on antique columns, and a Venetian wall whose gate still has the lion of St Mark guarding the approach from the water. We walked the Kalelarga — the main street of the old town, straight as a ruler from the gate to the forum — and were back on board before sunset. The first evening always looks the same with me: the aft deck, an Aperol Spritz, and watching the port switch its lights on. Here there was something more. At the very end of the promenade are the Sea Organ: steps running down into the water, with thirty-five pipes sunk beneath them, and every wave that runs under the stone draws a chord out of them. The sound cannot be predicted and cannot be switched off — it is simply there, all night, for as long as the sea keeps working. The hostess served dinner on deck: fresh fish from the Zadar market, off the grill, and a bottle of local pošip.
Day 2 — White sand that should not exist in Croatia
Zadar → the channel between Ugljan and Molat → Sakarun on Dugi Otok → Božava
I was up at first light and did what I do on every charter: coffee and the flybridge. The Zadar channel at five in the morning is like a sheet of glass, the islands standing in milk, and that is the boundless calm you cannot buy ashore at any price. After breakfast we ran twenty-odd miles west to Dugi Otok — an island forty-five kilometres long and in places two wide. At its northern end is Sakarun: a half-moon bay of genuine white sand, of which the Croatian coast has almost none, because here everything is stone. The water over that sand turns milky turquoise and stays shallow for a good hundred metres off the beach. We anchored before noon and simply swam — no jet skis, no toys, just hours in water that sits at twenty-six degrees in August. In the evening we moved a few miles round to the east side of the island, to Božava: a small harbour, a pine park running down to the water, two restaurants and nothing else.
Day 3 — The cliffs of Telašćica and a salt lake
Božava → Telašćica Nature Park → Lake Mir → Kruševa bay
On the third day we ran down to the southern tip of Dugi Otok, to Telašćica — a bay cut eight kilometres into the land with twenty-five smaller coves inside it. But first we went round the island on the open-sea side to see the stene: a vertical limestone wall that at its highest stands a hundred and sixty metres above the water and drops another eighty below it. You run beneath it for a quarter of an hour and nobody on deck says a word. Then we came inside the bay, anchored, and walked over the ridge to Lake Mir — a salt lake separated from the sea by a narrow band of rock and fed through fissures in its bed. The water there is several degrees warmer than the sea, dense with salt, and it holds you up without effort. One of my guests said it was the closest to relaxed she has ever been. We spent the evening at anchor in Kruševa, one of the side coves, where after dark you cannot see a single light other than your own.
From my experience as a broker, two things you will not find in the brochure. First: in Croatia a charter yacht runs on a transit log — a document carrying an officially filed guest list, confirmed by the captain before departure and not amended en route. On this boat the transit log and the deposit insurance are already in the price; on many others they are a separate line the client discovers on arrival. Second: the national parks on this route are ticketed separately — Kornati, Telašćica and Krka are three independent tills, the fee is calculated from the length of the yacht and the number of people aboard, and a ticket bought in advance can be markedly cheaper than one bought from a ranger out on the water. Over a week like this that is not small change, and it is exactly the moment where it pays to have someone do the arithmetic before you sign, not after.
Day 4 — A hundred and forty islands and nothing else
Kruševa → Kornati National Park: Levrnaka and Lojena → Mana → the crowns on Kornat
The fourth day is the one you come here for. The Kornati are an archipelago of a hundred and forty islands, islets and rocks across three hundred square kilometres, almost entirely uninhabited, with no fresh water, no power and no roads — George Bernard Shaw wrote that on the last day of creation God wished to crown his work, and from tears, stars and breath he made the Kornati. It looks like a moon laid out on the sea: bare, pale ridges crossed by dry stone walls that somebody stacked by hand a century ago to stop the sheep walking down to the water. We anchored first under Levrnaka, in Lojena bay — one of the very few shingle beaches in the whole archipelago — and stayed half a day. In the afternoon we moved across to Mana, where stone ruins of a village stand on the ridge, built in the 1950s as a film set and simply left there, and from Mana along the outer edge of the archipelago to the crowns: the cliffs on the south-western shores of Kornat and Mana, breaking straight into the open sea. For dinner we went into one of the Kornati konobas — a few tables on a stone terrace, power from a generator, water brought in by boat, and fish the owner had caught that same afternoon, baked under an iron bell with potatoes. There is no menu. There is what was caught.
There is nothing to see on the Kornati. That is precisely why you sail there.
— Tomasz Wrzesiński, yacht broker, Monaco
Day 5 — Eight miles up a river
Kornati → Žirje and Kaprije → St Anthony's Channel → Šibenik → Skradin
On the fifth day we ran southeast past Žirje and Kaprije and in the afternoon entered St Anthony's Channel — a narrow, winding cleft between two walls of forest, which is how you get into Šibenik. It is the only city on the Adriatic whose entrance you cannot see until you are inside it: the channel bends, the walls draw apart, and suddenly the sixteenth-century fortress of St Nicholas stands to starboard and the whole bay opens behind it. And here begins what I consider the most underrated passage in all of Croatia: from Šibenik you carry on, up the river Krka, eight miles inland, across Lake Prokljan, to the little town of Skradin. Hills and reeds on both sides and entirely fresh water under the keel. You stand on the flybridge of a twenty-metre yacht in the middle of the countryside and are not quite sure what to do with the fact. Skradin has a marina, a stone town on the slope and a quiet you will not find in any harbour on the coast. In the evening we walked up to a konoba above the moorings for dinner, and that was the moment the table goes silent — the real magic of this week.
Day 6 — Waterfalls, and ice cream on the Šibenik Riva
Skradin → Skradinski Buk → back down to Šibenik → Prvić Luka
On the sixth day we were up early, because you visit the Krka waterfalls first thing in the morning or not at all. Private boats go no higher than Skradin — from there the national park's own launch takes you, a quarter of an hour upriver, and sets you down below Skradinski Buk: a seventeen-step cascade more than a hundred metres wide, which you walk on timber boardwalks running above the water and between the old mills. Swimming there has been banned for several seasons — rightly, because it is the only way the place survives — but walking those boardwalks at eight in the morning, with mist still standing over the water and no coaches yet, is worth every minute of the early start. We were back aboard for a late breakfast and dropped back down the river to Šibenik. In the afternoon we climbed to St Michael's Fortress above the cathedral — from its walls you can see the whole channel we had come in through the day before — and ate ice cream on the Riva, sitting on the wall by the quay, watching the yachts lying stern-to. This series has that ritual permanently built in. We spent the night a few miles on, at Prvić Luka: an island with no cars, one harbour, one village, and an evening in which the loudest thing was the cicadas.
Day 7 — An easy run back north
Prvić Luka → the Pašman channel → Sukošan
The last morning looked exactly like the six before it: coffee on the flybridge, a sea like glass, the islands still in shadow. We went north at an easy pace up the Pašman channel, along the inside of the islands, in no hurry, and around lunchtime stopped once more at anchor on the way — a last swim, a last hour in water that had not once been cold all week. After that it was sun loungers, books and Pašman sliding slowly past to port. We came back into Sukošan in the late afternoon, tanned and suspiciously quiet. Stepping off KNITWEAR.CLUB3's deck I thought what I think every time I come back from northern Dalmatia: this is the cruising ground for people who want a week on the water, not a week queuing for a table.
What it costs, and what you should know
M/Y KNITWEAR.CLUB3 — Absolute Navetta 64, built 2025, 19.5 metres, six guests in three double cabins each with its own bathroom, skipper and hostess included, teak decks, flybridge, air conditioning, generator, barbecue, paddleboard, wakeboard, water skis and snorkelling gear — charters from €29,759 per week outside the peak to €35,010 in high season 2026, and that rate already carries the crew, the deposit insurance and the transit log. It is a different commercial model from the big fully crewed yachts: there you pay the charter fee plus an APA of around thirty per cent, here you have a rate with crew in it and you add fuel, provisioning, marinas and park tickets on top. Which model works out cheaper depends on how far you actually cruise and how often you sit in a marina rather than at anchor. The boat's base is D-Marin Marina Dalmacija in Sukošan — twenty minutes from Zadar airport, which with a family and children matters more than it sounds.
Something you will not find in the brochure: the whole route in this logbook is about a hundred and thirty miles over a week. On a yacht doing twenty-eight knots you would cover it in two days — and miss everything you came for. Northern Dalmatia is dense: two or three hours between stops, so there are no days lost to passages and no temptation to drop anything from the plan. There are traps, though. Kornati and Telašćica have designated anchorages and mooring buoys and you simply may not lie outside them, and the ranger appears on the water at unpredictable hours. Getting into St Anthony's Channel and on up the Krka needs a yacht of the right draught and a captain who has done it — not every boat on the Croatian list will get up there at all. And finally the bura, the wind off the land, can rise here in a quarter of an hour and shut several anchorages for a day, so the order of the stops is built around the forecast rather than around the map. The same route in the wrong order is the same yacht and an entirely different holiday. With a specific yacht and a specific week, checking that and setting the order is my job. You have the map; a guide is still worth having.
Want to actually sail this route? KNITWEAR.CLUB3 works the Zadar archipelago, the Kornati and all of northern Dalmatia. Tell me when you are going and who with — I will check availability and the boat's paperwork and build the week around you. See this charter →
Enquiries: tomek@wyachts.com | WhatsApp +33 6 72 85 87 30 — Tomasz Wrzesiński, W Yachts Monaco.