Prices tended to be lower in Montenegro (£6-£15 a head for two courses with wine), than Croatia (£10-£30 a head), and wine was pricey relative to the food in both countries, topping £8 a bottle. Our experience of local wine was mixed, although we had our greatest luck with a white wine called Posip (bottles that cost less than £5 are not a bargain, and best avoided) and a red called Plavac.

The daily agenda aboard Rhea slips nicely into the routine of a morning sail to find a quiet bay for lunch, swimming, snorkelling (although there’s not a lot of marine life to see), canoeing, waterskiing and wakeboarding, plus occasional forays onto dry land, then an afternoon sail to port. Here, the enduringly fiddly task of finding a mooring space, then slotting into it, bring evening entertainment for all onboard and the crowd that invariably gathers on the quay.

Imagine driving a Bentley into a car park coated in black ice where the only available space is between two Jaguars; and you don’t have power steering. Modern yachts often have bow and stern thrusters to propel the boat sideways to counter wind or straighten up for a mooring, but Rhea has none. It’s only David’s intimate understanding of how she operates, even in a side wind, that gets you into harbour.

Once docked Penny serves anchoring drams. She's a cordial hostess who can produce a cup of tea, a bacon buttie and even a lunch of lamb and salad pittas in rough weather. It is only the smells wafting through the galley hatch that alert those lounging on deck that another tasty lunch is being prepared.

There’s a lot of lounging; I’m not sure whether it’s the loll of the sea, or the utter surrender to holiday slovenliness, but once onboard people snooze in the day, but have no problems getting a full night's sleep. You don’t have to be lazy – although David and Penny have two crew members who’ll take care of the rope pulling, they’re happy for you to join in.

Our charter’s crew included daughter Julia, whose patient waterskiing instruction was welcome, and Ramazan, a Turkish bodybuilder-type and rope-puller extraordinaire. There are no motorised winches on Rhea, so the sails are hoisted the good old-fashioned way, and it was a thrill on our penultimate day to be sailing into Montenegro all sails up and the boat purring at eight knots.

Interrupting the tranquillity, Rhea did not let us down with moments of adventure. Unravelling our anchor from an unmarked fishing net as the wind slowly blew us towards the rocks, gave us an anxious half hour. Then there was the time we returned from a boozy supper to find Ramazan ready to up-anchor as we’d drifted toward a sleek racing yacht that turned out to have smashed a transatlantic sailing record and be worth a small fortune. Its crew were waving and shouting for us to move, which meant dodging moored boats in the darkness. It didn’t phase Rhea's crew, but it got us landlubbers excited.

More indulgent highlights included eating lobster at Sponga (tel. 0091 588 3948; lobster costs £55/kg), a restaurant at Polace on the island of Mljet, where the owner swore he had been visited by Abramovich the night before. We’d first seen Abramovich’s boat in Dubrovnik, and had tailed him to Mljet, where we were surprised by his taste in restaurants, although Sponga’s mismatched plastic furniture belied the quality of its sensational seafood dishes.

Mljet was also the scene of one of our most amusing land expeditions, when we hired a fleet of scooters and a car dressed as a mouse, to visit a fresh water lake in Mljet’s national park. The lake is pretty and has a sandy cycle track around it, so in truth it’s best visited by bicycle, but our expedition was worthwhile just to hear the hoots of laughter as the mouse car passed quayside cafes.

For holiday memories, Rhea is been unbeatable for her charm, coastal scenery that changes daily and the inevitable adventures of a holiday on water. Reading through the guestbook it’s clear she’s offered once-in-a-lifetime holidays to families who have recorded their exploits in cartoons, poems and stories – a dog-eared visitors’ book to which I hope to add another entry myself one day.

Need to know

For details on how to charter Rhea, which has availability in August and September 2007, go to www.sailingandvillaholidays.com. The approximate charge for one week’s charter is E12,750 for up to eight guests and E14,250 for up to ten guests. This price includes two meals a day and fuel, but not harbour fees, drinks, evening meals, taxis and cruising taxes. Rhea can sleep up to ten guests in five cabins, with one larger double aft cabin and four smaller double cabins in the centre and front of the boat.

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