Sunday 21 June – Friday 26 June 2020
We spent the next four days in Cala Bassa, relaxing, swimming, sunbathing and generally being very lazy in the glorious weather. By Wednesday 24th, however, an uncomfortable degree of swell was working its way into the bay, and we needed to attend to domestic necessities, so on Thursday we motored 16M up to the head of the inlet, where the resort town of Sant Antoni de Portmany is located. In a normal season, this place is reputed to rival Ibiza town for all-night partying and booze-fuelled sunbathing, but in the current climate it’s reminiscent (for Mate, anyway) of Blackpool with sunshine. Most of the shops, bars and restaurants are closed, and the sands all but deserted.
While saddened for the locals dependent on tourism for their livelihoods, this suited us very well, and we soon found the launderette, clean and well kept as always, with machines automatically filled with detergent and softener – a warning to the sensitive-skinned. Opposite was the ‘Fruit Market’, a row of four conjoined sections of a prefabricated unit, offering a wide range of good quality local and imported produce at reasonable prices. In season just now are juicy tomatoes, delicious oranges straight off the trees, aubergines, cucumbers and several varieties of melon, to name but a few. Mate’s having gone completely veggie is no hardship here.
Having stocked up at the local Eroski supermarket on sundry provisions, including an expensive but very good local cheese, made from a mixture of goat and sheep milk and encased in crushed thyme (other varieties to try include fennel, oregano and basil coatings), we trundled a very full Bertha (shopping trolley) back to the tender and across the shallow bay, weaving our way through many moored and anchored boats.
We enjoyed trying out our new snorkel masks and flippers to explore the world under our keel, spotting several interesting varieties of fish and checking our anchor was well bedded into the sand. We’d managed to wiggle inside a number of shallow-draught catamarans, and were lying in only three metres of clear turquoise water.