Milly Mingles with Industry

Our approach to Shengjin showed a beach town like many we had sailed past.  High rise apartments of nondescript block type and thousands of beach chairs lining the waterfront.  Many of the towns we have been in during our 3 years on the water, have those multi-coloured, Helvetica script love signs naming the town.  This one was handmade and somehow seemed more genuine because of that.

After a 14 hour! motor sail - in the Mediterranean Milly is too often a motor boat - we arrived in Shengjin, a commercial port only a few miles from the border of Montenegro.  Albania has very few anchorages, partly because it's leeshore offers little shelter but also because of the threat of hitting an as yet unrecovered landline on the sea bottom.  Coming from Greece where the waters are full of pleasure sail and motor yachts, small and very large, the lack of the same in Albania, only ten's of miles away, was startling.  In the tiny marina, there were a handful of foreign boats and a few Albanian flagged motorboats, mainly abandoned.

We took the "no anchoring", "no fishing" icons seriously after reading this warning on our chart!

 The only marina is in the south of the country and we were headed north to Montenegro.  We decided to head to the beach resort town of Shengjin to complete the necessary clearing out process with a recommended shipping agent - necessary in Albania.

Our berth in Shenjin between the blue hulled LPG tanker and the defunct little pilot boat you can just see beneath the crane.  

Our very portly, kind agent named Frrok Frroku met us and rafted us to the pilot boat.  We were actually grateful to at least have the smooth hull beside us rather than the enormous black rubber bumpers for ships that lined the dock.

Taken from our stern, this shrimping boat was appropriately fended off the concrete dock by the black bumpers.  Great for the fishing boat, not so great for the likes of Milly.

Our neighbours.  Milly had not yet had the like.

Lots of gas lines fed the tanks on shore.  Off-putting!

Frrok drove Peter 200 m to his office to check in.  We had originally said we would stay two nights in order to have a walk about.  Frrok had even offered to drive us around his hometown.  But....after a very still night with a distinct propane malodour, we decided to clear out and head to Montenegro.  We felt a bit guilty - Frrok was disappointed - but it was just another beach town, after all, and he wouldn't be taking us on any hikes into the hills.  Montenegro here we come!

Good-bye, Albania