The captain dropped anchor at 06:40. I know this because it was the last time I looked at a clock for two days.
We had left Hvar the previous afternoon, motoring south along the coast of the island with the low sun catching the limestone cliffs and turning them the colour of warm bread. The plan - if you could call it that - was to find somewhere quiet for the night. Not a harbour, not a marina. Somewhere the only sound would be the chain settling on the seabed.
The cove did not have a name on the chart. Or if it did, nobody mentioned it. The captain had been here before, years ago, on a smaller boat. He remembered the depth being good and the holding solid - sandy bottom with patches of weed, sheltered from the prevailing north-westerly by a headstone of rock that rose vertically from the water. From the deck, you could see the cliff face dropping away below the surface, pale stone becoming blue becoming black.
There was no beach. No path. No building visible in any direction. The nearest road was somewhere behind the ridge, but you could not hear it. You could not hear anything except water moving against rock and the occasional splash of something small jumping near the stern.
The First Evening
The chef had picked up fish at the morning market in Hvar - two whole sea bream that he grilled on the aft deck while the rest of us swam. The water was 24 degrees and so clear that you could see your own shadow on the seabed six metres below. One of the guests - a management consultant from Munich who had been checking his phone every twenty minutes since boarding - left it on his towel for the first time and did not ask about WiFi once during dinner.
We ate on deck as the light went. No candles needed for the first hour - the sky stayed a deep, transparent blue long after the sun dropped behind the ridge. The kind of blue that looks like it has been painted on and is still wet. When the stars appeared, they arrived all at once, as if someone had switched on a display. Without light pollution, the Milky Way was visible as a physical thing - not a faint smear but a dense, textured band across the entire sky.
Nobody suggested going anywhere. Nobody suggested doing anything. The boat rocked gently on its anchor chain, and eventually people drifted below to their cabins without any formal goodnight, just the quiet padding of bare feet on teak.
Morning
I woke before anyone else, or thought I did. The captain was already on the bridge with a coffee, checking the weather and the anchor position on the plotter out of professional habit. He nodded when I came up but did not speak, and I was grateful for that. Some mornings need silence the way other mornings need conversation.
The water was glassy. Completely flat, reflecting the cliffs so perfectly that the line between rock and reflection had dissolved. A cormorant was fishing about fifty metres off the bow, diving and resurfacing with mechanical regularity. I watched it for what felt like five minutes and was probably closer to thirty.
The swim platform was already down. I sat on the edge and lowered myself in without diving - partly because the water was cold enough to earn a moment of hesitation, partly because breaking that surface felt like interrupting something. Once in, the chill passed within seconds and was replaced by a kind of weightless alertness. Every sense dialled up. I could feel the faint current moving along the cliff face, could hear the tiny sounds of the hull above me, could see the anchor chain curving away into the deep.
I swam around the headland to a second, smaller cove that was invisible from the anchorage. There was a rock shelf just below the surface, covered in sea urchins and small anemones. A school of damselfish hung in the shade of an overhang, turning as one when I passed. I floated on my back for a while, looking up at the cliff edge where wild rosemary and sage were growing out of what appeared to be bare stone.
The Hours Without Structure
The thing about spending 48 hours in a cove with no agenda is that time stops behaving normally. On land, an hour is an hour. It has a shape and a weight and a set of expectations attached to it. Here, time became something more elastic. Breakfast happened when people were hungry, which turned out to be around nine. Lunch appeared at some point in the early afternoon - a spread of Croatian cheese, olives, bread and tomatoes that the chef had prepared without anyone noticing.
Between meals, people did what they felt like doing. One couple took the tender to explore the rock formations at the base of the cliff. Another spent most of the morning reading on the foredeck under the shade sail, occasionally looking up when a gull passed overhead. The consultant from Munich borrowed the snorkelling gear and disappeared for two hours. When he came back, he had a sunburned nose and an expression I had not seen on him before - something between wonder and embarrassment, as if he had been caught enjoying himself.
In the late afternoon, the captain suggested we could move to a harbour for dinner if anyone wanted to go ashore. Nobody did. The chef made pasta with the leftover fish and a sauce built from tomatoes, capers and local white wine. We ate early and watched the light performance repeat itself - the slow drain of colour from the sky, the stars arriving in clusters, the Milky Way solidifying overhead.
What You Hear When There Is Nothing to Hear
The second night was quieter than the first, which should not have been possible. But your ears adjust. By the second evening, I could hear things I had been deaf to 24 hours earlier. The sound of the anchor chain shifting as the boat swung with the current. A fish breaking the surface somewhere off the port side. The faint creak of the hull settling, which the captain told me was the fibreglass contracting as the air temperature dropped.
There was a moment - maybe around midnight, when I had come up to the deck for water - when the silence was so complete that I could hear my own heartbeat. Not in the anxious way you sometimes hear it lying in bed at 3am, worrying about something. In a neutral way. As a fact. As a sound among other sounds, no more significant than the water or the wind.
I stood there for a while, looking at the stars and listening to nothing, and it occurred to me that this was the first time in months - possibly years - that my brain was not narrating. Not planning, not reviewing, not composing an email, not rehearsing a conversation. Just receiving. Taking in what was there without commentary.
It lasted maybe ten minutes. Then I went back to bed and slept more deeply than I had in a very long time.
Leaving
We pulled the anchor at nine the next morning. The consultant from Munich was the last to come up on deck, and he stood at the stern rail watching the cove shrink behind us for longer than seemed necessary. When he turned around, he said something in German to his wife that I did not catch, and she laughed and put her hand on his arm.
The captain set a course for Vis. The wind had come up overnight and the boat was moving well under sail, heeling gently with a rhythm that felt earned rather than mechanical. Within an hour, the cove had disappeared behind the coastline, indistinguishable from every other fold in the rock.
I checked my phone for the first time in two days. There were 74 unread emails. I put it back in my pocket and went to sit on the foredeck, watching the bow cut through the water and feeling the spray on my feet.
The emails could wait. They always can.
This dispatch is a composite drawn from multiple Dalmatian coast itineraries. The cove exists, but we are keeping its location between us and the captain.