Ferry logistics

When we were done with Split we had planned to take ferries between a lot of the islands from there to Dubrovnik.  You may need to pull up a map for this, but we had dreams of Split to Brac to Hvar to Korcula to Miljet to Dubrovnik.  The ferries in the San Juan Islands worked that way - they travel between the islands in all different directions, so when you're done with one you can move on to the next.  Better yet, you pay your fare in Victoria, and then can take them forever between islands until you finally finish and reach Anacortes.  If you lived on the islands I think you could take inter-island ferries for free forever.
  Not so much here.  First we learned that there aren't too many inter-island ferries, mostly we'd have to go back in to Split and then back out to switch islands.  Much worse, however, is that  many of the ferries are fast ferries, and take no cars, and apparently no bicycles either.  So, now we might even have trouble reaching Dubrovnik with the bikes!
  Tourist info staff has generally been unhelpful and often wrong.  We were told that there was no way to get the bikes from Split to Dubrovnik by ferry, and we should take a bus (sometimes we've been told that you can't bring bikes on the bus, other times that you can).  Between looking at two ferry maps and talking to many different ferry people, we found a solution (open your map again) - we would take a ferry from Split to Vela Luka, on Korcula, and camp there.  Monday we would bike across Korcula and camp on the eastern side.  There is a ferry that runs just twice a week from Korcula to Dubrovnik, and we would take that on Tuesday.  Problem solved!
  One reason we kind of had to find a ferry route was that it's nearly impossible to bike from Split to Dubrovnik.  The only road is the coast road, and the one piece of consistent advice we heard was to avoid the coast road from Split to Dubrovnik.  Any other route would take us far inland, up and over mountains into Bosnia and Herzegovina.  That, and we really wanted to see the islands - we'd heard that they were really beautiful, so I'm glad we found a way!