Greece my palm...

 

After Italy, Greece makes a welcome relaxing change (yes my beloved Italia does have some faults!).  The Greeks and Greece may have some issues but at least we know the “rules” and somehow that makes all the difference.

First stop Corfu and we find the island to be a much more interesting cruising area than we thought it would be and we quite happily potter around for a week or so before heading down towards Preveza.  While in Mandraki it was great to catch up with our old boat “Key West” (and of course Pat and Dave!).  Great to see they are still enjoying her and she looks in excellent shape.

Time to pull out again and Cleopatra’s in Preveza is as efficient as usual and after approximately 750€ (lifting and chandlery etc) and a couple of days on the hard, we are ready for lifting back in.  The new antifouling (Noa Noa on the hull and Marlin on the prop) promises many slime free miles of sailing and perhaps a better turn of speed!

 

On a sad note we notice a lot of large dead turtles on the beaches of Preveza… some are suspiciously light when I roll them over… whether it is starvation (not as many jellyfish this year either) or fisherman bashing them on the head for being in their nets it’s hard to say but I am pretty sure Murray doesn’t want me to drag them back to the boat for a full autopsy!  (Yep still can’t resist poking around in a dead animal.)  Hopefully it is just a brief problem and not the start of an epidemic of some sort.  We have already noticed the lack of dolphins in the area and the large pod that used to occupy the inland sea seems to have disappeared entirely.  Not good news.

Now we are on home turf as it were and back in the “duck pond” of the Ionian.  Not much has changed.  There is some evidence of the economic downturn (closed shops and restaurants) but on the whole it is business as usual.  One thing we have noted is the lack of porn magazines and tasteless tourist tat… there must have been an EU directive to clean up their act! 
Bramble is into crickets at the moment but like most foreign food she complains that you eat it and then you are hungry half an hour later…

Not crickets!!

In Lefkas we finally managed to obtain the elusive DEKPA (cruising log) we need to be legal in Greece.  It’s the usual system, Port Police, Tax office, here, there and back again, collecting as many stamps and pieces of paper along the way as you can… I can only imagine what a Greek Monopoly game must be like.  200€ for passing Go but only if you have been to the tax office to pay the .003% tax on it and collected the 12 stamps and 4 signatures required by regulation 147.9.  And as for paying for building maintenance and repairs on you hotels… well… let’s see there is the mayoral visit, the planning office officials to be talked to and Costas brother who provides all the items required for such an operation and then the tax office etc etc etc…
They were thinking of implementing a new cruising tax here that would have set us back a cool 1200€ per year but luckily the Port Police refused to collect it and since then it has all become too difficult and been confined to the overflowing “too hard basket” for another year… Mrs Merkel will not be pleased!  In honour of saving money here we lash out on a secondhand folding bike… hopefully many happy hours of biking will follow.

 

Breaking news:

Bramble thinks about going vegetarian working on the principle that if no animal was killed during the making of meal, it must be a vegetarian… yum to eggs and cheese and fish… sounds strangely like a lot of vegetarians I know!

Papa Francesco is keen to overturn the Vatican law preventing priest from marrying… you go Francis!

The number of refugees that have arrived in Italy this year now tops 80,000.

Just saw a superyacht with a 40ft yacht and a 42ft Sunseeker on the aft deck… holy moly, now that’s cool.  We also note that Skorpios Island off Lefkas has been bought by Russians (the owner is worth $8.8 billion although he had to pay his ex-wife $4.5 billion in the world’s most expensive divorce settlement!) and is patrolled by ribs and gun toting guards now… their superyacht sports a giant waterslide from the top deck… kind of cool too I suppose…

We are planning on dropping down the Cephalonia and Zakynthos to visit some places we haven’t been to yet and then round the bottom of the Peloponnese again to catch up with Uncle R and rendezvous with Sonya in Athens so we have to push on out of the Ionion.

It’s nice to be on familiar territory and we get some good sailing in and it isn’t too rushed with plenty of time for swimming, kayaking, eating, drinking and merry making as well as stops in all our favourite places and other new anchorages.  Our trip to Porto Kaiyo is its usual downhill sleigh ride but unfortunately just as we are smugly congratulating ourselves for being centre cockpit and above the reach of the large following sea a rogue wave punts us up the butt and sloshes into the aft cabin… un disatro!!  Still not too much damage incurred but a lot of washing required!  It is just as windy and bleak in the Mani as we remember so we plan move on to Elefanisos and drop down to Kithera quickly.

Elefanisos is still an incredibly beautiful place but unfortunately the green light has been given to a hotel to be built (even though it is a protected area) and they will have rights over the anchorage as well… another example of how desperate the Greek government is for money.

 

Kithera also turns out to be lovely, if more controlled than we are used to for a Greek island… there are a lot of Aussie Greeks that have returned home here and the number of instructional signs reflects this!

In the news:

                40,000 yazidi are chased to the top of a hill in Iraq and left to die.

                90,000 refugees have now landed in Italy this year (02/08/14)

For every Italian soldier that was killed on Kithera, 50 Greeks were chosen at random and shot as punishment.

Syrian chemical weapons will be “destroyed” off the coast of Greece using hydrolysis… the solution to pollution is dilution… not a popular project here on Kithera.

Bulgarians are voted the maddest people in Europe – we believe this is true, but in a good way, having helped a few moor up recently.

 

Now we really are coming “home” as we round the Peloponnese, head up towards the Saronic Gulf and set our sights on Porto Kheli… next stop Villa Marina.