Half way through the charter we woke to a fairly reasonable day in comparison to the previous few and grabbed the opportunity to make the long, rolling sail/motor out to Stromboli. Our motor past the crater on Stromboli showed us it was full of activity for which we were rather relieved! It seemed to be fairly hit or miss as to whether you catch anything or not. The best time to view it however is in the dark when you hope to see some of the pyrotechnics erupting from the crater so we anchored off the town for lunch and waited anxiously until sunset when we lifted anchor and slowly made our way round to the crater.
The smoking crater of Stromboli
What an incredible sight we had!! I don’t think words can do justice to such a display. I attempted to get the camera going but after playing with it and missing a lot of the action whilst getting lovely black photos, I gave up! We sat in idle just off the bottom of the hillside and every 10-15 minutes of so, the crater would light up in an orange glow and you knew something was about to happen. A few seconds later and the crater would start spitting out hot lava in a wonderful fireworks display before watching them roll down the hill still glowing. It was then difficult to decide when to leave, not wanting to miss a big one, but eventually after about 5 explosions we made our way back to Lipari Island with dinner on the move.
Clare