When the 160-foot motoryacht Ohana launched just a couple of years ago, the owners had the idea to offer by-the-cabin bookings similar to a small cruise ship. But demand was so high for full-yacht charters in the Croatian cruising grounds that the practically new vessel is already undergoing a refit.

“We convinced them to upgrade it to a yacht with the amenities and service of a superyacht, and make it just for private charter,” says Aymen Boulehmi, marketing manager at Goolets Ltd. “To do so, they needed to do many upgrades to the cabins, salon and deck, and add many new amenities on board as well.”

The refitted yacht is expected to start accepting bookings this summer in Croatia, a nation that continues to be a highly sought-after East Mediterranean destination for motoryacht charters. The section of the Croatian coastline from the walled city of Dubrovnik south to Montenegro’s Bay of Kotor is particularly well suited to charter, with everything from historical cities to natural islands and quiet bays available to explore. Fans of the show “Game of Thrones” are particularly drawn to this region, where filming for the HBO series often took place in locations that tourists can visit today.

Ohana’s onboard guest spaces include a cinema where those “Game of Thrones” episodes can be watched after days of having fun in the sun. The yacht’s sun deck has an open bar, a barbecue, hanging egg chairs, an open fireplace and loungers for sun-worshipping time. A shade can cover the space around the hot tub for guests who want more protection from the elements. Inside, the yacht has a children’s playroom—an onboard space that is becoming increasingly popular aboard superyachts being ordered from European shipyards. There’s crew space for the addition of a babysitter as well.    

The Croatian Coast

• Dubrovnik has an Old City that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture is centuries old and is preserved in fountains, churches, palaces and more. 
• Korcula is an island about 20 miles long that’s sometimes called Little Dubrovnik because of its preserved buildings. 
• Hvar is another popular island, with fields of lavender, olive trees and vineyards. 
• Brac island is less touristy with rocky shores and popular scuba sites.

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Ocean Independence says the owner of the 127-foot Oceanline One Blue is eager to book more charters this summer in Croatia—so much so that he’s dropping the yacht’s weekly base rate by 20 percent.

The new lowest weekly base rate to charter One Blue is about $76,300, with new dates available for booking in July and August.

One Blue is a 2009 build that accommodates 12 guests in six staterooms. The yacht charters with six crew.

Top speed is reportedly 28 knots, making an exploration of the Croatian coastline a doable itinerary.

What kinds of water toys does One Blue carry? The yacht has personal watercraft, a Seabob, standup paddleboards, kayaks, water skis, tow toys, snorkeling gear and fishing equipment.

How to book a week on board: contact a charter broker at oceanindependence.com

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For Missy Johnston, the words that came to mind were authentic, honest and true.

She was in Croatia, visiting wineries during a yacht ­charter, when she arrived at the Dubokovic Winery on the island of Hvar.  Its proprietors are members of a family that has passed down winemaking techniques for generations, offering tastings today much as they used to be in the old days.

“You go to the house and go down into the winery and taste the wine by candlelight,” says Johnston, who owns ­Northrop-Johnson Yacht Charters Newport. “These are far more serious and better wines than in Turkey or Greece. There, you try to get the best local wine that you can get. In Croatia, you’re getting good wine.”

Crewed yacht charter in ­Croatia has been growing in popularity for at least a decade, as the region recovered from the Bosnian War of the early 1990s. Today, everything from restaurants and wineries to port services and shipyards not only have recovered, but also are blossoming into ­higher-end operations. They allow for the kinds of experiences and s­ervices that crewed yacht charter clients worldwide have come to expect — along a coastline filled with historical architecture and untouched, natural beauty.

One of the ­companies that Johnston works with in the area, Summer Breeze, is launching no fewer than four Croatian-built yachts into its charter fleet this summer. The one that has everyone talking is Lady Gita, a 161-foot steel sailing yacht with an interior of darker wood and light, ­almost white fabrics — a departure from the taupe and tan decor that Croatian yacht owners have been emulating since the 122-foot Navilux launched in 2011 and became a charter success.

“Lady Gita is the first one that is doing something completely different,” says Helena Catipovic with Summer Breeze. “Her owner gave the interior work to a Serbian designer who never worked on interiors, and it’s a huge challenge, and he’s ­really doing wonderful work. Lady Gita has a really elegant look, really classy.”

Lady Gita is expected to charter in the region between Split and Dubrovnik, a location filled not only with historical architecture, but also with culinary experiences. In addition to the wineries, there are what the locals call shell farms, growing some of the ­finest oysters in the world, served alongside locally grown food that is cooked much the same way that it has been for centuries.

“The whole business of organic farm-to-table, sea-to-table, is a strong concept in Croatia,” Johnston says. “They have what they call homestead dining. Grandpop goes out and catches fresh fish that they grill over a wood fire, and all the food is done under the peka bell. It’s a big, cast-iron dome shape that goes down onto a stone slab. They build a fire early in the day on the stone slab, and once it all goes down to ashes and the stone is extremely hot, they put all the food in a little ring on top of the clean, hot stone, and they lower the peka bell down on a chain. They put all the hot ash on top of the peka bell, and that’s basically their version of a Dutch oven.”

The Oysters of Mali Ston

The bay of Mali Ston is located on Croatia’s Pelješac peninsula, near Dubrovnik. Because the Neretva River regularly flushes fresh water into the bay, the overall water constitution is brackish — making it ideal for what the locals call shell farms. Oysters are the primary crop, with mussels in the mix as well; this area has been known to produce as many as 2 million oysters a year. The shell ­farming here goes back centuries. Remnants have been found of oyster farms dating to the Roman Empire.

Nature’s Recipe

What makes the oysters from Mali Ston among the world’s most sought after is the constitution of water in the bay. There is the original salt water, which mixes with mineral-heavy fresh river water and phytoplankton. The blend of nutrients is so distinct that oysters grown just a few miles away do not taste the same.

The Harvest

Oysters are grown on nets that are sunk into the bay. Oystermen pull up the nets by way of a line, put back the young oysters and harvest the mature ones. The process is done by hand, just as it has been for generations in this part of Croatia’s bountiful coastline.

Notes of Brine

Just as grapes grown closer to a river will produce a wine that tastes different from wine that comes from landlocked vines, oysters grown in different parts of the bay have different tastes after being harvested. Shell farmers whose areas are farther from the freshwater river produce oysters with a slightly saltier taste.

Eating Naked

It’s not you who should be naked (unless that’s how you choose to spend your charter time), but instead the oysters, based on local growers’ recommendations. Adding lemon, horseradish or other flavor profiles makes it harder to taste the natural, briny flavors.

The Plump Factor

Fresh oysters from Mali Ston look much plumper than the oysters typically served in restaurants around the world. The difference is dehydration. Oysters pulled straight from the water are still hydrated inside; during days or weeks of travel to restaurants, they dehydrate, leading to the commonly flattened shape.

One of Johnston’s must-visit restaurants for charter clients is Bota Sare in Mali Ston, on a bay known for fantastic oysters.

“They use recipes from the grandmother, her Croatian dishes and sauces,” Johnston says. “They have their own shell farm, so everything they serve has been harvested that day. They have their own vegetable garden. They make their own bread in a wood-fired oven. They have their own olive trees and press their own olive oil. They have their own bees and make their own ­honey.”

The dining experience, she says, is much like a Croatia charter itself: “It couldn’t be more real, more truthful.”

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Kateryna kyslyak was traveling the Croatian coast between Dubrovnik and Split, making all the stops that charter clients can make, trying to figure out how far from each port the cast and crew from HBO’s Game of Thrones had gone to shoot iconic scenes. It took her just two weeks to find seasons two through six. “It almost looks like on TV,” says Kyslyak, whose company, Contact Yachts, is offering Game of Thrones charter itineraries this summer. “I have never seen anything better preserved than the old towns of Croatia. They wouldn’t need that many graphics or extra people; they were filming while tons of tourists were just walking around.”

The show’s final season is scheduled to air in 2019, and excitement is high in places where the cast and crew have filmed. Those locations dovetail with popular waypoints on yacht-charter itineraries: Dubrovnik is a main filming location for King’s Landing, capital of the imaginary Seven Kingdoms in Westeros; it was in real-life Gradac Park, just outside of Dubrovnik’s Old Town, that fictional King Joffrey was poisoned during the show’s Purple Wedding; and Fort Lovrijenac is the filming location for the Red Keep (whose imposing seaside presence, in reality, has earned it the nickname “Dubrovnik’s Gibraltar”).

Crews from the HBO show ‘Game of Thrones’ film often in Croatia — at locations easy to access by charter yacht.

“Local people, they offer guided tours, and they also tell you stories about their relatives who played a sadistic part in some episode, or maybe they played a slave,” Kyslyak says. “They tell you the stories and then recommend where you can eat at a local place where the cast and the crew had dinner.”

The really good news is that Game of Thrones tchotchke shops aren’t sprouting up everywhere to mar the natural beauty. A few are around, but Kyslyak saw just one during the entire two weeks that she scouted sites. Otherwise, the spots are perfectly preserved, which is likely what attracted the show’s producers.

“The artisans, the shops, they’re doing their own thing,” she says. “They are very welcoming, and fans will definitely find their way. You don’t need to look for the locations. They’re just there.”

The stretch of Croatian coastline from Dubrovnik to Split has been popular with charter clients for a number of years now. It can include stops at locations such as Mljet, Korcula and Hvar, which offer a combination of beautiful natural backdrops for watersports fun, as well as classical architecture for sightseeing. During a seven- to 10-day charter itinerary, Kyslyak says, it’s easy to incorporate the Game of Thrones stops along with those others.

Days can begin around 10 a.m. with breakfast aboard, and because the sun stays up late during summer, afternoons can go on as long as everyone is having fun ashore. Two days apiece in Dubrovnik and Split should do it, with everywhere in between being negotiable according to the charter client’s tastes.

Locals in Croatia will tell you about their relatives who played sadistic extras or slaves in past episodes.

For instance, with a stop at Klis Fortress near Split, Game of Thrones fans can discuss its fantasy-world namesake — the city of Meereen — while charter guests who don’t watch the show and simply want to enjoy the scenery will also have lots to do.

“I highly recommend it,” Kyslyak says. “You see a panoramic view of the Adriatic and the whole coast. And not only that, but you also see the villages and how Croatians really live. You can just embrace all of it.”

She offers just one warning: Don’t wait too long to book. The season seven Game of Thrones premiere drew a reported 30 million viewers last year, and with season eight expected to be the last, fans are likely to swarm come summer 2019, when it airs.

“Here in Europe, everybody is watching it too,” she says. “A lot of my friends, when they found out I was going to the locations, they couldn’t believe it.”

The post Embark on the Ultimate ‘Game of Thrones’ Yacht Charter appeared first on Yachting.

A black squall hangs low between two spits of white limestone — points we have to cross to reach Croatia’s Kornati National Park — and at all of 18 hours aboard, the Aeolian gods, the Greek gods of wind, are teaching us a lesson. The seas are confused, and our chartered Elan 434 sailboat pitches too hard for the autopilot to keep up. Nearby lightning strikes shock the helmsman through the wheel.

“Surmountable adversity is very unifying,” says Kim Binsted, a NASA specialist in crew composition, from her warm perch in the companionway. She had chartered our bareboat from Croatia Yacht Club and selected five adults — some strangers, some old friends — to join her weeklong vacation. “Of course, if the crew fails to surmount adversity, it can have the opposite effect — that is, we will all blame each other.”

She’s only joking a little. Rather than cruising idly among sun-bleached islands of lavender fields and cedars, we are being pasted by southerly jugo winds, colloquially known as the “bad wind.” The stakes for a summer sailing holiday are significantly lower than for a three-year mission to Mars, but you couldn’t tell that to some of our lesser experienced crew.

Croatia spoke to us like a memory, some lost world where cobblestone streets, hanging balconies and red roofs roast under a high summer sun, where rosemary-perfumed mistrals would blow us to secluded island harbors. Binsted had summoned us to her vessel, and we answered the call. Our crew consists of Binsted; Tammy Castleforte, a former Army captain; and Kenny Longenecker, a marine biologist and our de facto captain — all of whom are next-door neighbors in Hawaii. Then there’s Paul Betney, a stand-up comedian from Liverpool in the U.K. who decided to see the world as crew on tall ships. And me. I live in Manhattan, an island off the coast of America.

The start was shaky even before the storm. “For us to unify, the adversity should be an outside force,” Binsted says. An ill-timed wienerschnitzel detour in Vienna had cost Castleforte and Longenecker a connecting flight, and the pricey overnight train ride left them simmering in mutual resentment. “Conflict within a crew, obviously, is not unifying.”

Croatia is not undiscovered, not now. It is the heart of the millennial rave circuit, a bull’s-eye for cheap European package holidays. But for the private yacht, Dalmatia’s coast is still a magnificently lonely place, a fleet of empty islands just across the Adriatic from the Italian boot.

We arrange to meet and provision in Trogir, a fortress built on the fortunes of emperors and invaders; Roman caesars, Byzantine princes, Venetian doges, Napoleon and Tito have all claimed dominion in the ornate walled city. Across the canal from the old town is a covered market where Adriatic bounty is for sale: tomatoes, plums, figs, hand-hewn sausages, cheeses and olive oils. We buy a ham. No one had ever owned an entire ham before, hoof and all. As insignificant an exercise as shopping might be, we unwind in the market stalls. Astronauts lose weight in space in no small part because eating is an essentially communal act; MREs are isolating and dull. We discover what NASA has spent millions to learn: Meal planning builds cohesiveness. “Cooking is a way to show care for your crew mates,” Binsted says.

As quickly as the storm comes upon us that first day, it yields to the promised light thermals and robin’s-egg-blue skies. By dusk, we are in port at Uvala Opat, adversity ticked off our list. Knee-deep in bonding, the single crew members disembark for a hike, pretending we had no idea a couple was reconciling in the V-berth. Astronaut crews develop “useful fictions” as a coping mechanism in tight quarters, Binsted says. In the simulated Martian habitat on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, which she directs, crew members are granted a limited number of sick days. “You just say, I’m sick today — leave me alone.”

It is the chronic irony of sailing that we are alone at sea and yet cannot escape the myopic familiarity of our crew mates. First mate Betney, the comedian, is the stranger among us. He knew only Binsted before the charter began, but he is a tall, lionhearted Scouser who jokes easily and laughs often. Since the launch of the International Space Station, integrating outsiders into crews has been a concern for NASA, Binsted says. “You might have just one Russian cosmonaut in with a bunch of American astronauts, or vice versa.”

Our group might never have met Betney in any other circumstance, but he makes himself easy to love, sweating his way to the top of a barren peak, staring down on the blue slipper of a bay. Cruising north through the park, motoring as much as raising sail, we bask in the middle-age calm of a place with few people and no discos, where the community of cruisers is more likely to include grandparents and babies than DJs spinning beats. At Telašćia Nature Park, moored beside a pine forest, we hang jugs of black wine off the lifelines and wake in the morning to the braying of wild donkeys. The supermarket motors up soon after: a dinghy bearing fresh tomatoes, hot bread and home-brewed fruit brandies.

Dalmatia’s jugo winds are credited with the grumpy posture of fjaka, a kind of national harrumph that is said to make Croatians lazy when the sultry gusts stir. It brings on headaches, bad judgment and criminal lethargy — apocryphally, it’s even been used as a defense in murder trials. But we discover an entirely upbeat version that includes sunning on deck, Sudoku and, once we drop the hook, improvised cocktails. (Dalmatian Sunset, The Split, Fjakalicious — I forget the recipes.)

I retreat to the galley. The ingredients of the Adriatic are so compelling, fresh and basic, erupting out of 16 hours’ sunlight — herbal, citrusy, lamb, rabbit — I find fjaktastic joy in nourishing a crew who makes me so happy. Cruisers note a division of labor into “pink jobs” and “blue jobs,” female versus male, where in space the division tends more toward science versus engineering. On a three-year trip to Mars, however, NASA is keen to see how crews will divide the tasks of everyday life, says Binsted, who also crewed a Mars simulation on Devon Island in the Canadian high Arctic. “We have found there is often chore swapping. So, in the Arctic, I ended up swapping my cleaning chores for cooking, which seemed like a damn good trade too.”

Our final port takes us beyond the parks to Kaprije, population 143, literally the Capri of Dalmatia in Italian (Capri di Dalmazia). It’s a bayside village on a car-free island so rocky that Kaprijians are compelled to build walls, generation after generation, mazes and buttresses to nowhere, just to squeeze in another olive tree. Crumbling houses are festooned with bougainvillea and runaway creepers. It’s a time machine, the place we imagined when we decided to see these old islands in such an intimate way.

Sipping the first of many beers on the stucco promenade, Binsted explains how the week aboard has worked so perfectly: “Our crew saw ‘cohesion’ as a mission task, rather than something abstract — that is, cohesion is something to do, rather than a state you hope to find yourself in.” The clock tower strikes 6. She orders another round of Karlovaco beer for everyone at the table. “And it’s something to succeed at. NASA crews are very success-oriented.”

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