On Midsummer Saturday, our journey continued eastward from Fuengirola.
It was clear that we had unmistakably arrived in the Mediterranean. As other sailors have told, in the summer the Mediterranean is either windless or wind is blowing more than you care for. Well, today there was no wind, so it was iron genoa time.
Then we needed to select our next anchorage. This is not easy as the well sheltered anchorages on the coast of Spanish mainland are a few and far between there. The Med is rather a big sea and there tends to be always a small swell coming from somewhere. Swell and unprotected anchorages mean restless sleep and it’s not ideal daytime either.
The Spanish coast is also very overdeveloped and it is rare to find an anchorage without hotels and aparment blocks looking over it.
There is the town of Nerja in between Almerimar and Malaga and 10 km outside of Nerja there is a remote beach called Playa el Cañuelo. This beach is also called a secret beach because it’s difficult to access. Private cars are not allowed to drive down to the beach. The car park is 1.5 km and 160 metres uphill from the beach.
The weather forecast for next few days was completely windless. The swell was from the east and Cala del Cañuelo is somewhat sheltered from the eastern swell, so this anchorage sounded extremely tempting and thus we motored 44 nautical miles in windless day from Fuengirola to Cala del Cañuelo.
And what an amazing place we found with crystal clear water. We dropped our anchor at 6 meters of water and next morning Andrus wonderd where our anchor is? In the evening we could see it well dug into the sand but in the morning it was gone until he noticed it was buried in a sand at our stern. The boat had moved around during the windless night so we had just drifted on top of the anchor 🙂
There were a couple of restaurants on the beach that closed after dinner time and there were no discos at all. At sunset the beach quieted down and due to the lack of development there was no light pollution and we could admire the stars in the evenings. This place is truly magical in right conditions.
Next few days we chilled out and enjoyed fully the summer and the sea. It really felt like the vacation had begun in honest.
