On board at Kos
Posted at 7:23 PM, May. 5, 2010
Blogging now underway. We arrived back in Kos on schedule after a 36 hour door to door flight but all on schedule and only got hit Eur20 for overweight luggage from Athens to Kos – Olympic airlines seemed far more generous than Aegean airlines who extracted every last dollar last year for excess gear.
Back on board Savarna everything seems to be under control and we have spent a couple of very solid days work cleaning, polishing, getting sails on and canvas covers set up and still the work list is long. The teak was pretty dirty as although Babis had been hosing it off from time to time the dust from northern Africa seems to become imbedded in the teak – one of local maintenance guys on the marina describes this as a gift from Gaddifi.
We lifted out yesterday afternoon (Tuesday) a day later than booked as the time taken to pay the 0.88 cents tax took 5 hours – mainly caused through the extraordinary bureaucracy not assisted by the fact we had not obtained a customs clearance to leave the boat unattended for 6 months. Also found that this involves paying a tax which is levied for every 3 month period which cost us Eur280 for each 3 months – so my thinking that the marina fees were a lot lower than Turkey is still correct – just not as lower than I thought. Other yachties be warned – and this is not the threatened cruising tax introduced as a proposal by the old government in late 2009 but not yet passed into law and we are told the proposal is on hold.
Savarna in the travellilft at Kos, Turkey in background and the sky what we see every day - we miss the clouds!
The Greek economy might well be relatively stuffed (high brow economic terminology) however operators at the marina in Kos say that the forward bookings are vey strong and they are looking at a great year. But we are hearing some dreadful stories of some of the stringent measures the government is taking – maybe the best is that apparently over a 5 year period they aim to have all taxpayers return all their income and pay the correct amount of tax. Now changing the culture of tax avoidance will certainly be a challenge!
The plan is to depart Kos Friday for Symi, Rhodos to Fethiye where we need to be by Monday. Today will see what progress is made on the anti-fouling front but talking to the guys in the yard late yesterday I am not optimistic that we will be back in the water in time to enable a Friday departure. A bit of drama in the yard today when heard a big bang and looked around and saw the travellift had dropped a 65 foot cruiser bow down onto the concrete. It seems as though the steel pin in the strop broke - glad it was not us as dropping a keel boat bow down would likely cause huge damage.
We have a couple of maintenance challenges to resolve the main one being that the wind gear is not working and almost certainly it is a transponder problem at the top of the mast. A call to the Simrad guys in Auckland is coming up – I am not keen on going up the rig when the boat is on the hard so we may well depart without repairing and attend to on the way. Invariably it is more than the transponder but possibly base plate corrosion also. So it may be a stop in Marmaris where all parts are well available for a quick repair.
Cheers
Keith