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With delays for repairs and then further delays for the hurricane, the sailing season this year has ended much too early. Lyra is now out of the water, enjoying her first winter ashore. We have a small number of maintenance jobs to do in the Spring before she goes back into the water and it seemed a good idea to give her a prolonged break from the sea.  Despite the lack of sailing this year, we have enjoyed visiting the wilder shores of the Peloponnese. We have met some incredibly good people- both Greek and international sailors and started to get under the skin of this incredible country. Kalamata itself seems quite charmless on first impression and, yes, it does have its issues, but it has found a new place for itself as an isolated city far from Athens and it seems to work. International flights have opened up tourism-despite the fact that the Greek Government has not supported this development. In fact that's one of the major problems that came up in conversation everywhere: bureaucracy is killing Greece. If the recession and the EU don't finish the country off then the civil service in its various forms probably will. Greece is hamstrung by ridiculous red tape and licensing and it is just hard to get anything done. There's no doubt that with a small amount of infrastructure development (mooring buoys in rocky bays for example) yachting could develop much more along this beautiful coastline. It makes sense to everyone we talk to , but everyone says it is just to hard to make things happen- just look at the four or five unfinished marinas in this part of Greece alone.  
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