A field guide from Vinogradišće bay · Summer 2026
We sail these islands most weeks of the season, and we still drop anchor in a cove we thought we knew and find it changed by the wind.
The Pakleni are ten minutes off Hvar town, a low run of pine and limestone. You read them from the water, not from a map. And the wind plans the day more than you do: dead calm at dawn, the maestral by mid-afternoon. We keep four villas and a restaurant here at Zori, in Vinogradišće bay on Sveti Klement, which is where most of our days start and end. Here is how we read these waters, for what it is worth to anyone bringing a boat over.
Ten minutes out, and the noise is gone
The crossing from Hvar town takes ten minutes. We have done it more times than we could count, and it never quite loses the trick of it. The harbour falls away behind the boat, the engine note drops, and by the time the first cove opens you have stopped reaching for your phone. The islands are low and green, all Aleppo pine, the limestone pale down at the waterline. The biggest is Sveti Klement. Nobody local calls it that. To us it is Palmižana.
There are no roads worth the name out here, so everything happens by boat. That sounds like a limitation until you live a week of it. Then it turns into the whole point. Nothing is far, so a day stops being a plan and becomes a drift. You go out after a slow breakfast, swim where the water looks right, and come back when the light starts to go.
The wind runs the day
Learn two words and you are most of the way there. The bonaca is the dead calm of early morning, when the channel goes to glass and the loudest thing in the bay is a halyard ticking on a mast somewhere across the water. That is our hour, before anyone has decided anything. Then the maestral comes up, the sea breeze that blows most summer afternoons. It cools the terraces and fills a sail without any fuss.
It arrives around three, more reliably than any of us manage to. So we take the open water at midday while it is working, and keep the sheltered coves for the evening once it lies down. Watch the wind instead of your watch and the day more or less sails itself.
You do not sail the Pakleni against the clock. There isn't one.
Coves we keep going back to
Every island holds a few anchorages, and they change with the hour. Some open wide at noon, good for a long swim off the stern. Others sit behind a headland and stay calm into the evening. In between you thread channels so narrow the pine almost brushes the rail, and on a hot afternoon you smell the rosemary before you see it. We will not hand you a numbered list. Half of it is finding your own.
The one we always come home to is Vinogradišće, on Sveti Klement. It is sheltered. The marina is two minutes through the trees. And there is dinner at the end of it. You can work out from that bay for a week, and the run back in still gets us, after all this time.
Where we tie up for the night
ACI Marina Palmižana is right in the bay, and the cove takes a fair few boats at anchor besides. If you would rather sleep on something that does not move, we keep four villas above the water at Zori, one party to each. There is more on the four residences and how they sit over the cove, and our restaurant on the water writes its card each morning from whatever the boats land. No printed menu. To be honest we never know in advance either.
The same hands have kept this bay since 1947. Three generations of us, and the rhythm has not really shifted: in by water, eat what the sea gave up that morning, let the evening run as long as it likes.
How long does it take to sail there from Hvar?
Ten minutes to Palmižana, the nearest island. After that you are moving between coves in minutes, not hours. It is a place for pottering about, not for passages.
Do you need your own boat?
It helps, but no. Plenty of guests come in on a yacht or a charter and work the coves at their own pace. Others just take a taxi-boat over from Hvar town and walk the pine paths on Sveti Klement. For the far anchorages, though, and for swimming straight off the deck, you will want something with a hull under you.
When is the sailing easiest?
May to October. The sea is about 23 °C in June, nearer 26 °C in August, and still around 24 °C come September. We quietly prefer late May and September. Warm water, steady maestral, half the boats.
Zori Timeless