Last year there was a rather amusing story here in the Gazette about a car, with the handbrake left off, rolling down the beach and into the sea, somehow missing everyone on the beach.
Well, if you are taking a few rays this year, it looks like you should be looking for danger from the other direction. This is, of course, news that a boat, with nobody on board, crashed onto the rocks at the Punta-de-la-Mona end of the bay.
On a pleasant Sunday afternoon, locals were amazed to see the boat, called, Captain Akab, steering directly for the rocks, with no deviation in direction or reduction in speed. As it turned out, there was no crew, only a T-shirt tied to the steering wheel to maintain a steady course.
The Guardia immediately launched an investigation into what had happened and commenced a search, in case anyone had fallen overboard.
Well, part of the mystery was solved when an Almuñécar man, named only as MBDH, 30, came forward to say he was on the boat prior to it running aground, although, so far, he has done little to enlighten the police on the reason for the grounding.
The Guardia will no doubt want to speak to him about the search for anyone from the boat, which only discovered 13 bales of hashish weighing in at around 400 kilos floating around in the waters between Maro and Cerro Gordo. Also, during the search they found a British man, from Málaga, in an inflatable boat adrift due to a lack of fuel. As it turned out, the boat had a double bottom, but nothing was found in the void, although subsequent searches by drugs dogs did indicate that illegal substances had allegedly been stored there previously.
The boat, meanwhile, was removed from the rocks by crane and taken to a ‘lock up’ after being thoroughly examined by the Guardia Civil. However, it appears that it wasn’t only the Guardia that were interested in the boat with the 200hp engine, because during Monday night, the compound was broken into, and all the alarms disabled on the ‘lock-up.’
The next morning, the Guardia found nothing missing, but that some parts of the boat had been interfered with, which led the Guardia to further believe that this vessel is somehow involved in illegal drug transportation. The Guardia Civil continue to investigate.