Two childhood friends, one Marina Frapa pontoon

Same primary school, same youth-football club, same daily walk past the Marina Frapa pontoon they would later own a piece of. Fourteen seasons later they still answer every WhatsApp message themselves and sleep five minutes from the dock.

How it started

Đivo and Vlaho were inseparable until 1999, when school finally split them. Đivo's father had worked the night shift at the Gruž port for thirty years; Vlaho's grandfather had been one of the Marina Frapa harbour-masters in the 1960s and his uncle still ran a small dive shop two pontoons down. Both grew up half on land and half in the water.

Vlaho signed up for the Croatian merchant navy at nineteen. The next ten years he spent on container vessels rotating between Hamburg, Genoa, Rotterdam and Algiers. He picked up the Croatian Maritime Skipper licence (Category C) on shore leave in 2009 and his Coast Guard sea-rescue certification a year later, mostly so he could eventually come home and put a working boat back on Lapadska obala.

Đivo stayed on land. Tourism programme at the University of Split, then three Dubrovnik hotels in five summers — front desk at one of the smaller Old-Town pansions, then concierge desk, then activity coordinator at one of the bigger Lapad properties.

The wedding

In October 2011 they reconnected at a mutual friend's wedding in Cavtat. Around the second bottle of pošip, Vlaho started complaining about the state of Dubrovnik's watercraft rental scene — corner-cut briefings, rented dinghies with no insurance, three different middlemen on every booking. By the third bottle Đivo had a napkin out and was sketching what a properly licensed, locally owned operation could look like.

Two months of weekends and one trip to the Croatia Boat Show in Split later, they had pooled €40 000 of personal savings, picked up one used Yamaha WaveRunner and one second-hand RIB, registered Adriatic Jet d.o.o. (OIB HR74829163504), and printed the first set of business cards with two phone numbers on them — Đivo's for bookings, Vlaho's for anything happening on the water.

The first season

The dock sign went up at Marina Frapa on 1 May 2012. The first booking came in by phone three hours later — a German couple from the Valamar in Lapad who had wandered down to the marina and seen the new pontoon. By the end of that summer the logbook recorded 412 charters, zero insurance claims, and a small Rolodex of cruise-line crew already pencilling in next year's port calls.

The same two faces, every season since

Fourteen seasons later the fleet is bigger — four Yamahas (two 130 HP, two 90 HP), one Sea-Doo GTI, with a small fleet of support tenders — but the people on the dock are the same. Đivo handles every booking enquiry between 08:00 and 22:00 CET. Vlaho signs the briefing log on every session.

What we are not

Not a booking platform. Not a reseller. There is no escrow split, no commission share, no "operator partner" we have never met. The Yamaha you ride at 11:00 was serviced by Vlaho himself at 17:00 the day before. If something goes wrong on the water, the WhatsApp goes to the same skipper, not to a call centre in another country.

What we are

A registered Croatian limited company with a single physical base, a single owner pair, and the full set of certificates a Maritime Authority inspector wants to see. The Croatian Maritime Authority examines every machine in our fleet annually. Captain Vlaho holds Skipper Licence Category C, Coast Guard sea-rescue certification, and Croatian Red Cross First Aid 2026–2028. We carry €1 million in passenger liability insurance per vessel through Croatia osiguranje.

The numbers