Sipanska Luka is the first village in Croatia we visited. There are only two roads in town big enough to handle cars. Most of the streets are narrow pathways and very few cars are seen. It’s a very clean place and the people are very friendly. The buildings are mostly constructed of stone or masonry and they all have red-tiled roofs. A small ferry service comes to town twice a day. Overall, it is a quite and peaceful place.
While sitting on the boat watching the city life, I saw a guy using an interesting machine. I’m not sure if he had invented it himself or if these are common around here but it’s the first time I had seen one. The gentleman had brought his speedboat into the town boat ramp and needed to pull it out. He had a home-made trailer and what looked like a roto-tiller without the tillers. It had big wheels, a gas engine and some other weird connections on it. He hooked up the roto-tiller device to the trailer using the trailer hitch on the machine and started it up. He backed it down the very narrow ramp (remember the streets are all very narrow) and wrestled the boat onto the trailer. It chugged and chugged that boat up out of the water. The angle of the ramp to street level was rather steep and the weight of the boat was putting a big bow in the trailer beam and it got high-centered on the concrete angle. He tried a few times to get it off with the motorized device, then had a couple of buddies stand on the back of the trailer and try to make it un-bow a little bit. With the extra weight on the back and a couple of others pushing he made it over the hump.
The boat is now up on the flat sidewalk are and he started messing around with it for a while and I lost interest in watching him. Soon, I heard the roto-dragger machine start up again and looked over to see that he was now using it to power-wash the boat. He runs it for an hour or more while he cleans the bottom of the boat. I thought he had quite a nice little invention there with his rotorless-roto-tiller-dragger-powerwasher. Who knows what else it could do?
Everyone I spoke with here had at least some english language skills. Our dinner waiter told us that he and his friends learned english from watching sub-titled American Hollywood films. He had even picked up various english dialects and accents. He could recognize people from New York versus people from the South by their accent and he could also mimic the accents well.
Speaking of Hollywood, we were fortunate to arrive on the last day of the Ljetna Skola Filma Sipan Filmski Festival! It was quite a big event for this small community and we were here for the big finale. From what I could gather there was a film school or film camp for youth on Sipan. The student film awards, recognitions and best of all - the films they created were all planned for the evening. We saw some very professionally done posters around town and figured out that tonight was the last night. We hoped to somehow determine the location of the festival so we could be sure to attend. Charlie and I took about three steps further and saw was a large (maybe 12x12 foot) outdoor projection screen and two benches sitting in front of it. We located the venue for the event! I knew then we were in for a real treat.
We planned our dinner to allow time to walk a block to the film venue. When 9:00 PM rolled around the place was packed with people. They had to expand the seating well beyond the two benches and had set up plastic chairs in the grassy areas around the screen. People were standing everywhere in anticipation of the start of the show. It began with recognition awards for the Skola Filma students. They were each called to the stage and given a bag of goodies. A few more awards were given, then the film began. I got a little lost on the plot since I had no idea what they were saying so I won’t get into a full review of the film. Let’s just say it was a great effort by the kids and I’m sure it made their parents proud!
The sunset picture in this series is looking out of our little bay to the Northwest. All the little mountains seen on the horizon are more of the Croatian islands. We depart in the morning to explore some more!
