Pantera Bay

Pantera Bay sits on the northwest side of Dugi Otok, shaped almost like a lagoon, and it's one of the more popular overnight anchorages on this side of the island. Dugi Otok — "Long Island" — runs 44.5 kilometres from end to end and is never more than five kilometres wide, and Pantera marks the far northwestern tip, where the land tapers to a low, pine-covered headland with a lighthouse on the end of it. For boats leaving Zadar it is often the first proper anchorage of a trip; for anyone heading south it is the last easy stop before the Kornati archipelago.

Anchoring in Pantera Bay

The bay is sheltered from every wind except the bura, which is the main thing to watch for — when it's blowing, most boats move on or tuck into the mooring buoys in the northern part of the bay. Depths through the middle of the bay run to 12 or 13 metres, so there is room to swing, and the inner arm known as Porto Cuna is reached through a narrow channel lined with mooring posts and shoals to roughly two metres, shallow enough that only smaller boats bother with it.

Coming in, it's safer to pass south of the green lighthouse marking the entrance; the water north of it is shallow enough to catch a keel by surprise, and there's a wreck nearby to prove it. The Italian cargo ship Michelle, a fertiliser carrier around 76 metres long, ran aground just north of the Veli Rat lighthouse in 1983 and is still there, lying in about six metres of water with the mast breaking the surface. The superstructure has collapsed over the decades, but the hull sits shallow and clear enough that it has become one of the easiest wreck dives in the Zadar archipelago and a standing favourite for drone photographers.

The bay shares its shelter with Marina Veli Rat, a 200-berth marina with the basics — a market, a café, bike and car rental — a short walk from the lighthouse that gives the area its name. Water and electricity are on the pontoons, supplied on a chip card and, in practice, only for a few hours in the morning and evening. It is a small, quiet marina rather than a resort, which is a good part of its appeal.

The Veli Rat Lighthouse

Built in 1849, during Austrian rule of this coast, the Veli Rat lighthouse stands 42 metres tall, making it the tallest on the Adriatic, with a beam that reaches 22 nautical miles and a signature of two white flashes. It still has a resident keeper, and since 2000 part of the building has been let out as holiday accommodation, one of a handful of Croatian lighthouses where you can actually sleep.

It sits in a pine forest alongside a small chapel dedicated to St Nicholas that's become a fairly popular wedding spot, and the climb up is worth it for the view — on a clear day you can pick out the islands of Ist and Molat across the water. The ochre-yellow walls come with the island's best-known story: local tradition holds that thousands of egg yolks were mixed into the render to bind it and protect it against the salt air. Nobody has ever produced a receipt for the eggs, but the colour has held for the better part of two centuries.

Sakarun, Telascica and the Kornati

Sakarun lies a short walk or a quick tender ride from Pantera, and it is the reason a lot of people come to this end of the island at all: roughly 800 metres of pale sand and fine shingle backed by pine forest, with water so shallow that it is still only around 3.5 metres deep some 250 metres offshore. The whole area is protected as a significant landscape, which has kept building off the beach itself and left the pines doing the work of parasols.

South along the island, Telascica has been a nature park since 1988 and covers just over 70 square kilometres. Its main bay cuts ten kilometres into the land and narrows to 160 metres in places; on the seaward side the cliffs the locals call the stene rise to 161 metres above the water and fall to about 90 metres below it. Behind them sits Lake Mir, a saltwater lake fed through underground cracks in the karst, with medicinal mud on its southeastern shore and a small herd of island donkeys wandering the scrub around it.

Beyond Telascica the Kornati begin. Eighty-nine of the archipelago's roughly 140 islands, islets and reefs were declared a national park in 1980, covering about 320 square kilometres, of which the island of Kornat alone accounts for two thirds. There are no permanent settlements anywhere inside the park. For sailors, though, Pantera stays the main draw at this end of the chain: it's one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet cruise in Croatia, usually a stop between Zadar and the Kornati islands.

Getting to Dugi Otok

Dugi Otok is reachable from the mainland by the car ferry between Zadar's Gazenica port and Brbinj, a crossing of about an hour and forty minutes, with five or six sailings a day in high season and three or four outside it. A faster passenger catamaran also runs from Zadar by way of the smaller islands of Rivanj, Sestrunj and Zverinac to Bozava and Brbinj. Neither lands anywhere near Pantera, so the last stretch out to Veli Rat is by road or, more sensibly, by boat.

The island is quiet by design. Around 1,655 people live here across eleven settlements, nearly all of them strung along the sheltered northeastern coast, with Sali in the south the largest at roughly 740 residents; the exposed western side is mostly cliff and scrub, rising to 337 metres at the island's high point. Fishing still matters, alongside olives, figs, vineyards and sheep's cheese, and outside July and August the anchorages empty out almost completely.