I won’t write about Croatia to repeat already written above but I’d like to mention Preveza LGPZ in Greece as option for Lefkada. Lefkada features huge marina with great choice of sailing boats. LGPZ is very close but it’s pretty hard to get a week of parking. The other option is Ioannina LGIO, port of entry and easy to get parking but it’s 2 hours drive to Lefkada.
Lefkada is where I usually sail from, but I fly to Preveza via airline.
Is Preveza GA-useable?
Graham wrote:
Is Preveza GA-useable?
It used to be but last time I tried to fly there, they told me max 1 day of parking.
Capitaine wrote:
Funnily enough, a few years ago I was sat next to an elderly lady on a transatlantic flight who was very proud of her train driver son, and she said that several of his colleagues had previously been airline pilots
Everyone goes on about airline pilots being “flying bus drivers”, in reality they are more “flying train drivers” – the airline and railway worlds have a lot more in common than they do with buses, in terms of a very strict rules-based work environment, with training, recurrency, philosophy to incident/accident investigation, safety technology etc.
Peter wrote:
I am amazed the service situation is as bad, given how many “rich” people mess about with these things. Pilots tend to envy the boating crowd, for the lack of stupidity like GAR forms, and in general the Royal Yacht Club has a heavy political clout.
The “rich” people probably have someone else mess with it on their behalf.
People of more average means tend to work on their own boat. It’s a great deal more economical than even flying a modest plane: our Hunter Delta 25 (sail boat) cost about 1/5th of the cost of our Auster to buy, we don’t need to have some government-approved inspector to sign off the maintenance work we do ourselves, and our harbour fees are a whopping £88 per year (and this entitles us to visit any other harbours in the Isle of Man at no extra charge, although if you want to go on a marina pontoon there will be a charge, but that comes with a whole load of other extra facilities). We have a really nice (brand new) marine VHF radio, antenna, and AIS transponder for less than 1/3rd of the price of a single aircraft COM radio, and we didn’t have to pay anyone else to fit it or sign it off. We don’t have recurring “boat crew licensing” fees or medicals to deal with, either.
Ultranomad wrote:
In Switzerland, this is allegedly happening directly under the auspices of Swiss / Edelweiss.
Triggered during the Covid crisis yes. The railways were desperately short of train drivers so they felt pilots are the same kind of responsible people they need. Win – Win for quite a few of them, who would have been stranded without a job otherwise. By the looks of it, it is just the beginning. Hopefully, they will come up with a similar scheme for surplus flight attendants and other airline personnel.
My youngest son set sail in a 18 foot (I think) open boat yesterday. He and a friend will sail about 160 NM down the coast from the Trondheim fjord down to Ålesund. It will take about a week. Here they row out from the marina before raising the sail in open sea. The night before he had a local flight with his girlfriend in the Alphatrainer. You can do both, flying and sailing 
The boat is called Færing, and is a traditional Norwegian open wooden boat since, well forever (at least a thousand years). They come in all sizes, from 14-15 feet to viking ships of 100+ feet. This boat is rigged for for-and-aft sail.
WilliamF wrote:
You can leave say a 1980’s aeroplane in for an annual and collect it with reasonable certainty. In a boatyard with something of the same vintage, you may be in a queue of unknown duration, you will be ordering your own parts, which will invariably be wrong and delay the job.
I think this is actually the normal situation except for heavily commoditized products. We are all spoiled by the reliability of our kitchen appliances, cars and mobile phones and the processes around them. As long as you buy mainstream, you can take your car to your workshop for the yearly or so service. If the workshop finds some issue with it in the morning it will order the required parts, they will arrive in the afternoon and the car will be finished by four o’clock. But this works only because products and processes for mainstream things are optimized to death. Order a VW Golf with the standard engine and you are fine. Order the high performance engine and every option you can get and you might soon run into reliability problems and and lack or mechanics who really know how to fix these. Now order a Ferrari and really use the horsepower you’ve just bought and its despatch rate will soon converge to that of a typical GA airplane.
I have made the experience that if you really care that your things are in order you have to do it yourself. If not you will often spend more time chasing after the people who you are going to pay for a job than you would need for the job itself. Recently I brought my tandem bicycle for some fixes into my local bike workshop. The bushings for the indirect steering were worn out and the suspension hat some cracked o-rings. I didn’t want to bother with finding out the exact parts to order and maybe need to order some special tools as well so I decided to get it fixed. The shop said they would fix it if I would buy a standard service (basically an annual). When I got the bike back they told me that they checked the brakes and the gear shifters and here and there added some lube but decided that the items I requested to be fixed weren’t worth to be fixed so they didn’t do it. Lesson learnt: If it is non-standard and requires some research or special knowledge better acquire that knowledge yourself. The simple jobs however you can source out. Like replacing a car battery. It is dead simple – at least on my car – but nevertheless I chose to let a mechanic do it because I couldn’t have done it that quick taking buying the battery and returning the old one into account.
