Adriatic falls

Bathers enjoy summertime in the waterfalls on the river Krka, near the town of Sibenik, on the Dalmatian coast. (AP photo)

The Dodi. That was the whimsical name of the sailboat we boarded - four friends exploring the islands off the coast of a country once called Yugoslavia.

They seem paradise, these hundreds of islands in the crystal-clear waters of the Adriatic Sea, perfumed in lavender, sage, rosemary and thyme, with sea gulls crying in the breeze.

One would never guess these islands off the coast of Dalmatia - now in Croatia - had survived thousands of years of bloody battles, the latest the Balkan war of the 1990s. At the crossroads of East and West, once marked by the Iron Curtain, this sea has borne ancient Greeks, Romans, and U.S. aircraft carriers on bombing missions to Bosnia.

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The four of us, all with roots in former Yugoslavia, spent 10 days far from our urban stresses, reclaiming the sights, sounds and smells of our childhoods.

My friends had gone on this Adriatic adventure a year earlier, leaving behind boyfriends for a relaxing "girl talk" time. This was a repeat trip, and I was invited along.

Our Italian-based shipmate, Patrizia Stekar, leased the sailboat - a 43-foot French-made Dufour Gib'Sea. She packed supplies for the boat that could have jump-started a Manhattan gourmet food shop - from olive spread, green peppercorns and puff-pastry dough to a dozen kinds of pasta and espresso coffee, and on and on.

We sailed from the island of Pag after buying rounds of sheep cheese made by a fisherman's wife. (Pag is part of Croatia, a Yugoslav republic that broke away in 1991, followed by war against the Serbs.)

At sea, Patrizia would call out in Croatian to the fishermen we spotted: "Ima ribe?" (pronounced EE-mah REE-beh) - meaning, "Do you have fish?"

Their faces weathered by the sun, these old men of the sea - and a few young ones - waited hours to trap even a modest catch. It's a challenge to make a living in waters overfished in recent years by industrial vessels equipped with freezers.

These old-fashioned Dalmatians inherited their traditional ways from centuries of rule by the Venetian Republic that governed the Adriatic. Modern pressures didn't dampen their uproarious laughter as they greeted us on the water, flirting from afar.

We watched as they pulled up the catch, then invited us onto their larger "cargo" boat for our own catch: plunging our hands into barrels of flopping fish. Then we took turns sitting at the back of our boat, feet in the water and armed with knives to clean the fish, dumping the remains into the sea.

Twice a day, our friend Lidia cooked us divine dishes, from risotto made of baby cuttlefish and calamari to raw shrimp sprinkled with olive oil, plus a bit of orange juice and rind.

Some of Lidia's recipes were from her Manhattan restaurant, Felidia, and her PBS television cooking series and books. But mostly, Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, this year's James Beard chef of the year, improvised on food she first tasted on her native Istria peninsula, farther north on the Adriatic.

Cooking was a challenge - "on semi-rough seas while the stove is swinging on a lever, against the movement of the boat, with a pot full of stuffed peppers. But not a drop came out!"

Improvising also meant fishing in the wild. One morning, as we jumped into the water for a swim, we noticed lots of round black spots on the seabed: urchins.

Lidia's first thought was, a lunch of pasta made with urchins, their reddish, caviar-like flesh scooped out after splitting the black shell. There was one problem: how to harvest these creatures covered with 2-inch needles.

The skipper put on goggles, grabbed a wooden cooking spoon and dove in. Lidia floated a plastic bucket on the water, and he pitched in the urchins as if going for dunk shots.

"The flavors that come from the sea are pure, pristine. You're eating shrimp that never saw sweet water, and have never been refrigerated," Lidia says. "I want to get the richest flavor from the fewest ingredients."

The daily decision was: Should we eat on the deck or down in the cabin?