We were looking forward to checking out Aydeniz bay after our friends Kevin and Dee on Sailing Kejstral Adventures recommended it. Before I go any further with our story, it’s important to let you know that they visited the bay before mid-summer and so their experience was different to ours.
Idyllic bay
After passing several fish farms from our previous anchorage at Salih Adası, Barry and I wondered if Aydeniz was going to be as good as promised. Fortunately despite the many fish farms on the chart plotter, the bay was actually free of them. On approach Aydeniz looked fairly nondescript, but as we got further in we saw just how beautiful it is.
There were little fishermen’s huts on the edge of the rock banks and the low lying hills one each side were covered with green bushes and trees. The turquoise water was crystal clear and in the summer humid heat, I couldn’t wait to jump in for a swim. At the end was a beach with a clearing, which led back to more trees, making a large invitation to go for a walk on land.
This is the type of idyllic anchorage that Baz and I look for and we imagined we’d stay there for a couple of nights.
Wasps
I’d enjoyed a snorkel around the rocky shoreline, Baz and I enjoyed a simple dinner and were having a relaxing drink as the sun slowly dipped towards the horizon. And that’s when ‘Scouter Wasp’ turned up. He buzzed around the boat, checking out this new large entity in his territory. He called in a handful of his mates, who were very interested in us and our food. We remained calm and relatively still as we finished dinner. By that time a few more of the wasp patrol arrived and began to get in our faces. We gently moved our hands around our heads as we made the decision to go down below.
I didn’t notice one wasp was sitting on my arm and as I moved I must have jarred it because it gave me a double sting before flying off. At that time the sting didn’t cause me any bother so I left it alone.
We went below and Baz filmed a few of the wasps that were buzzing around our swim gear that was drying on the stern gate life line. We managed to get the hatches shut, but not before a few had got in. Before I remembered that when you kill a wasp it lets out a pheromone to let the others know it’s been killed and where, I’d *sprayed a couple in my head (bathroom). Oops. Minutes later things got very busy on deck with what seemed to be hundreds of wasps checking us out.
By that time I’d remembered the waspy pheromone call for help and confessed to Baz that they may be on the lookout for the culprit. It was hot down below in the humid summer evening, but we got on with it and hoped that by morning they would have lost interest in us.
Of course at the time, I didn’t realise there were also four wasps who had drowned in the kettle water, which were also pumping out an SOS to their waspy mates.
Morning dawned. And they hadn’t lost interest.
Beach drone flight
However as the sun rose in the sky only a couple of the hoard remained and Baz and I took the dinghy to shore so he could fly the *drone over this picturesque bay.
Beach pollution
Sadly, as with many beaches that we’ve visited in Europe since leaving Spain in 2018, this little beach had not been spared and there were small pieces of plastic along with nylon fishing lines piled up on the beach. While many beaches are spared bad plastic litter because of their position relative to the wind and currents, this little beach was in a prime position to receive the waste from the fish farms.
This really is a global issue and requires a multi-pronged approach in my opinion. One thing that Australia does well is that it has regular Clean up Australia days, where hundreds of folk put in the effort to collect plastic from land as well as the beaches.
In fact, I was so used to seeing fairly pristine beaches when I lived in Queensland, it was a bit of a culture shock when I went for my first walk along the beach in Spain.
Baz got some great *drone footage and we headed back to A B Sea to set off early for a two hour trip to Didim.
Didim’s big bay
We arrived without incident and anchored in sand in 6m a long way off the shoreline of Didim’s big bay.
This bay is lined with restaurants, bars and clubs (the latter being open both night and day). And as you would expect, the beaches offer all the water sports that people would want on their holiday. These include banana boats, jet skis, wind surfers and of course tourist gulets. We arrived just after 9am and the gulets were all doing a parade of the large bay from their dock on the west of the bay. Each boat had its own original design. And each boat was pumping out its own choice of party music. Noise notwithstanding, it was pretty cool to see these large wooden boats heading out of the bay and it put me in mind of some pirate flotilla of a bygone era.
Editing in a cacophony
As the day wore on, the competing variety of music from the clubs on the beach increased, as did the horns, jet skis buzzing and rocking of A B Sea from water craft of various sizes.
I got pretty stressed as I was trying to equalise the audio on the video that I was editing and my headphones aren’t noise cancelling. I’m a person who loves silence and the natural ambient sounds of nature, so despite semi-successful attempts at keeping it background noise, it all eventually got to me.
With a deadline to get the video out I couldn’t just leave it until things calmed down, I had to keep going. It was all pretty stressful, so as mindfulness gave way to tension, I decided to ease things with a whisky (my tipple when I’m doing keto). A couple or three scotches later and I’d got my editing done and passed to Baz for his finishing touches and uploading to YouTube.
A chill evening
As the afternoon progressed the clubs closed down, perhaps for a between session lull. The sun slipped down behind the hills as Venus and the moon rose to hang in the dusky pink sky as it turned to a deep velvety midnight blue. The venues on shore turned on their lights and by night time the shoreline was very pretty with a multitude of different coloured lights reflected in the still water.
Baz and I made the decision to move to the middle bay in the morning as it seemed to sport only one or two small bars. There was a fair ground on the hill to the east of the bay, but that would be okay right? Find out next week how we got on.
To watch this week’s YouTube episode that accompanies this blog just click here.
Until next week, I wish you health, wealth and courage, as you take the actions to bring your dreams to life.
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