Thursday afternoon we start unpacking and cleaning. Moët22 is in very good shape, considering the winter they had there appears to be no leaks and very little mould etc. I start on the inside and Greg puts up the Bimini and pieces together the tender, minus the seat which seems to have gone missing, even though I handed it to him. We have a quite meal at the Marina and retire around 9pm.
After a solid six hours sleep, I'm awake, dam you jet lag! Anyway I get started on more cleaning and unpacking. I can't believe how cold it is outside our cabin where we were very snug; it's about 9 degrees outside. For the next four hours I work on the inside unpacking and cleaning and sorting. By 7am I'm ready for a coffee so we head to the Skippers Cafe for some great coffee and breakfast. We also hear fromMeg, Joon Tae and Je-Min on face time which is great.
Even though it's cold and it rained through the night, we wake up to a beautiful morning.
We hired a car from the airport so our first job today is to get our transit logged stamped so we can leave. This proves to be much more complicated than we first expected. The Port Police at Gouvia inform us we must pay some form of tax which we were not aware of.
We are sent to the Port Authority Office #3 which is a ten min drive away. They fill in a form that I have to take to the Tax Office just up the road. When we finally find the Tax Office there are no signs in English, I go to one counter, then another and then finally at the third counter after waiting another 30 mins someone grabs my form and reads it. Seems it's a new form of tax and no one really knows much about it. After some further forms are filled out I have to go to another counter for some reason I don't know then I'm directed to the cashier. Of course you can't pay with an Australian Credit Card only with a Greek Bank credit card. By this time I'm really questioning the tax and if we should be paying it as all. Greg decides before we pay 500 Euros tax that we get some advice from Vangellis at the boatyard which is close to where we are. Vangellis is also not aware of the tax and calls the Port Authority for us, oh it's a new tax. Seems the Govt. needs to find money any way they can and now charge non EU owned boats a quarterly tax to leave your boat here. WELL............ That changes everything for us as we were planning on leaving our yacht in Aegina for approx 18 months at the end of this trip. I don't think that will be happening now.
So once we go back to the tax office and pay the tax and get a receipt we have to go back to Office 7 at the Port Authority, they can't help us and tell us to go to Office 4 no good either, we then go back to Office 3 and they send us to Office 6 to get the transit log stamped so we can leave yeah! We then have to pay another 15 Euros for administration. Office 3 staples a copy of the receipt to the back of our transit log. We then have to back to Office 6 so they can staple the original to the front of the transit log. Wow five hours later we are now free to leave Corfu.......
