We found out that while we were in Palermo, we had missed a festival in Trapani. There were apparently fire eaters, which impressed Bill. Oh well.

Yesterday we did the usual get ready to go routine, including a trip to the grocery store. The day before, when we were in the first market in Palermo, Christi had said at least 5 times that we should stock up on fruit here, where there were zillion of produce vendors selling every type of produce imaginable. Most of it looked lovely. But we didn’t. So, we stood in a grocery store, staring at a small selection of nasty looking fruit. The apples and bananas looked edible, so we got some of those. Every grocery store we have been to outside of the US there is a person whose job it is to weigh the produce and print a little sticker with the total before you get in line to check out. This grocery store has a self use scale and sticker printer machine. The directions are, of course, in Italian. Tai and Christi couldn’t figure out how to use it. Mind you, Tai is involved in producing cutting edge software, and the scale baffled him. So, we gave up on the grocery store and drove around town in search of a street fruit vendor. This was a blessing in disguise. The street vendor’s fruit was beautiful and a fraction of the price of the shriveled up fruit in the grocery store.

Anyway, once we had taken out the trash, stocked up on food, stowed away the things that like to go flying at sea, and checked the weather one last time to make sure conditions still looked good, and we were ready to go. We said our goodbyes to Bill and Ellen and pulled out. At first, the sea conditions were rocky and rough, which was odd given that the wind speed was low. We figured the waves are leftovers from yesterday’s storm. At one point, Tai was standing outside the pilot house with the pilot house door open. Eric shut the pilot house door, telling Tai he didn’t want to chance a wave coming over the side and getting the pilot house wet. No more than three minutes later, a big wave came over the side and drenched Tai. Tai looked rather surprised and said “I guess I should have clued in when you shut the door”.

As the day wore on, the seas got calmer and nicer. By this morning, seas were flat and pleasant, though there were dark clouds and lightening off in the far distance. Wind was between zero and three knots apparent, with the wind gauge often doing circles in search of wind. We know sailors would be crying, but we were loving life, happily cruising along at 6.5 knots. We have to say that getting a full 8 hours of sleep at once versus multiple naps is wonderful, too. It really makes doing watch so much more pleasant when you are fully rested. It has been a long time since we’ve had any crew on board with us. Unfortunately, Tai got sick, though it passed fairly quickly.

We could see the volcano clearly by about 0800, an almost perfect cone with a crater on the peak, the gray smoke billowing up and blending with the gray storm clouds behind it. The storm clouds were kind of an anomaly as the rest of the sky looked pretty clear. We pulled into the town of Scari around 1300, about the same time as the rain rolled in. Tai and Christi went out front to grab the mooring.

For those unfamiliar with moorings, here is a quick tutorial. Basically, a mooring is a big heavy block, usually concrete, carefully placed in a body of water, generally near the shore. You are supposed to tie your boat up to this block instead of dropping anchor. Each of the moorings has a line that runs from the block to the surface of the water. The lines are generally very long so that it can reach up to your boat. The lines are all a little different from mooring to mooring, but close enough that you have a general idea what to expect as you approach a mooring. Most of the time, the rope is attached to a buoy (floaty thing of some sort), and you grab the buoy with a boat hook (six foot pole with a hook on the end) and pull it up to your boat. You always tie the mooring to the front of your boat. The front of our boat is much higher off the water than your standard sailboat, which makes it harder for us to grab the mooring line than for a sailboat. Moorings are often used in areas where the ground is unsuitable for anchoring, such as here in Stromboli.

So, back to the story”¦ It is raining. Not pouring, but raining enough to make things wet and slippery. And it is windy, causing the waves to be more violent than they had been only minutes prior. Christ assumes mooring grabbing the position, laying down at the front of the boat, near the anchor, with the right half of her body hanging off the starboard (right) side of the boat, right arm extended so the edge of the hook is just a couple inches off the water. We approach the buoy. There is nothing to grab onto on the buoy itself, but we can see that the rope floating next to it is looped so that can be easily picked up with the boat hook. She lunges for the rope. The rope was enormously fat, too fat for the boat hook to solidly latch onto, but she manages to get it hooked on well enough and gave it a good hard yank, expecting the rope to lift easily out of the water. The rope didn’t move. Christi assumed it was because she wasn’t strong enough and had Tai pull on it. It didn’t move for him, either. Christi tried again, and as Kosmos drifted ever so slightly from the mooring, Christi dropped the hook in the water. It was evident that the rope was only long enough to barely reach the surface of the water, with zero slack at all. If we were going to tie to this mooring, we’d have to get into the water and tie one of our own ropes to the loop in the water. Tai volunteered, but we refused to let him since it was rough water. We just didn’t think it was safe enough for a swim. Fortunately, the boat hook was still firmly attached to the mooring line and was easily to retrieve.

So, we tried again on a different mooring. It was a repeat of the first time, including dropping the hook in the water. The second time it wasn’t attached to the mooring, so we had a harder time retrieving the hook. We actually did quite a few circles before making contact with the hook. The erratic seas and conflicting current were pushing us and the hook all over the place.

Being gluttons for punishment, we tried again a third time, choosing a mooring closer to shore and in shallower water. Three times is a charm. This mooring had very little slack, but we could at least lift it up high enough out of the water to thread our own rope through the loop. Getting it situated properly and tied off wasn’t easy because of the rocky waters. But we did it and were proud. The rain stopped within 5 minutes of Christi and Tai going back inside. Poor Tai had cuts on his hands and his feet. It was now 1400. We were only in 15 feet of water, which made Eric a little uncomfortable, but we figured it was deep enough and would be fine. Eric muttered about his fear that the mooring would drag, then told Tai that if we did drag, he should immediately untie the line holding us to the mooring and head out to sea, which he pointed out as a course of 120 degrees. Tai laughed and said “that concrete block is as big as a Volkswagen. It isn’t going anywhere!”.

The wind was still howling and making the waves too violent to bring the dinghy down. Things calmed down a couple hours later, and at 1600 we started getting the dinghy down and went into shore. The pier is located at the southeast edge of downtown Scari, about ½ kilometer away from our mooring. Here is a shot we took in the dinghy of Kosmos with Stromboli and Scari in the background.

To be continued”¦