I've sailed seven episodes of this logbook now, from the Côte d'Azur to Corsica, and each time I thought the same thing: I still hadn't been where it gets most interesting — under a volcano. In August I finally stepped aboard. EXPLORA is a 2026 Azimut 82 Fly, a yacht so new this was its debut charter season — 24.8 metres of Italian flybridge, eight berths in four cabins, a crew of four with an Italian captain and chef, three Volvo Penta IPS engines and stabilisers that hold the deck flat both at anchor and underway. Interior by Fabio Fantolino, and at the stern the system Azimut calls Deck2Deck — a lowering platform that turns the aft deck into a terrace just above the water. Home port: Riposto, a small harbour on Sicily's east coast, right at the foot of Mount Etna. From a base like that the route almost plans itself — two days on the east coast below Taormina, then a hop north to the Aeolian Islands: seven volcanoes rising straight out of the sea, one of them still erupting.
Day 1 — Riposto & Taormina
We boarded in Riposto in the late afternoon. The chef carried the bags down to the cabins, the captain spread the week's chart across the table, and EXPLORA slipped quietly out of the harbour and, in under an hour, dropped anchor off Giardini Naxos, below Taormina hanging three hundred metres up on its rock. The first evening looked the way it should: the aft deck, a glass of Aperol Spritz, and two shows at once — the town lighting up above the bay and Etna on the other side, its plume of smoke turning pink in the setting sun. With the Deck2Deck lowered we sat almost touching the water with our feet. The chef welcomed us the simplest and best way you can on this island: raw gambero rosso — the red prawns from Mazara, sweeter than anything you know from the north — and grilled swordfish, pesce spada, with a chilled white from Etna, wine grown on hardened lava. We stayed on that aft deck long after Taormina had gone quiet.
Day 2 — Taormina & Isola Bella
I woke at dawn — still my favourite hour on the water. I made a coffee and took it up to the flybridge: the sea flat as a lake, Etna sharp in the morning light, the village still asleep, a boundless calm. After breakfast the tender ran us over to Isola Bella — a tiny islet joined to the shore by a ribbon of gravel — and we swam in water so clear the boat threw a shadow on the bottom a few metres below. Then the cable car up to Taormina: narrow lanes, the Corso Umberto, and the ancient Greek theatre cut into the hillside so that behind the stage, between the columns, stands Etna — two and a half thousand years ago someone set that auditorium down for exactly this one view. We came down off the hill for the thing you don't leave Sicily without: granita. Almond and pistachio, in a cup, with a warm brioche to dip — the locals eat it for breakfast and after two days you understand why. Evening again at anchor, again fish off the grill, again Etna smoking over everything.
Day 3 — Crossing to the Aeolians
On the third day we headed north. EXPLORA is no speedboat, but three engines carry her calmly and flat, and the stabilisers made the open-water crossing a matter of a second coffee on the flybridge and watching the cones rise out of the horizon one by one. The Aeolian Islands appear like a set someone overdid — seven volcanoes straight out of the sea. Vulcano is first, and you smell it before you see it: sulphur, hot springs, yellow fumaroles steaming on the slope. We anchored off a black volcanic beach and spent the whole afternoon doing precisely nothing — lying and swimming in water as warm as a bath, heated from somewhere underneath by the same mountain. The Seabobs stayed in the garage that day; water like this needs no help to be interesting. For the night we moved up to Lipari, the largest of the islands, and went ashore for dinner in the town below the castle: pasta with sea urchins, ricci, which you'll eat nowhere fresher.
From my experience as a broker
The Aeolians look on the map like one tight archipelago, but they're seven different worlds when it comes to shelter from the wind and the depth of the anchorages. In summer a tramontana or an afternoon northerly can shut half the bays — and a route that looks perfect on paper turns, in a bad weather window, into a week of jumping from one side of an island to the other. And Stromboli: to see the Sciara del Fuoco from the water you have to be there at the right time and from the right side, and that depends on the volcano's current activity, which the authorities sometimes restrict. Which islands hold in which wind, when to approach Stromboli, and where there's even a berth left in August — that's the part I take on.
Day 4 — Green Salina
On the fourth day we ran the short leg over to Salina — the green one among these sun-scorched sisters, with two extinct volcanoes cloaked in caper bushes and vines. This is where Malvasia delle Lipari comes from, the sweet golden wine the captain sourced straight from the producer, and this is where Il Postino was filmed. We came in under Pollara — the beach closed off by a great half-circle of cliff, exactly the one from the film — and swam at sunset, when the rock turns orange. Dinner — freshly caught tuna and a Sicilian caponata — we ate on the Deck2Deck, feet almost in the sea. All evening no one reached for a phone.
Day 5 — Elegant Panarea
The fifth island is Panarea — the smallest and most elegant of the Aeolians, a white maze of bougainvillea-draped houses that half of Milan descends on in summer. But we hadn't come for the bars. We anchored off Cala Junco — a cove closed in by an amphitheatre of rock, its water so turquoise it looks retouched — and spent half the day in the sea. In the afternoon the tender took us out between the islets of Basiluzzo and Lisca Bianca, where bubbles of volcanic gas rise from the bottom and you swim over them as over a natural jacuzzi. In the evening we went into the port for an aperitivo and came back aboard for dinner, because I wouldn't trade EXPLORA's galley for any restaurant.
You can go all the way round the Mediterranean and never see anything like a mountain that throws fire into the sea every quarter of an hour while you watch from the aft deck, glass in hand. Sicily has something no other route in this series has.
— Tomasz Wrzesiński, yacht broker, Monaco
Day 6 — Stromboli after dark
The sixth day was what you really come here for. Stromboli — a black cone rising a thousand metres out of the sea, one of the few volcanoes in the world in a state of near-continuous eruption, going off every dozen minutes or so for thousands of years. The islanders simply call it "Iddu" — "Him". By day we went in under Strombolicchio, a basalt spire with a lighthouse jutting from the sea, and swam in deep, navy water. But all of it was a prelude to what comes after dark. The captain set EXPLORA off the Sciara del Fuoco — the "Slope of Fire", the black chute down which the lava spills straight into the sea — killed the deck lights, the chef brought wine, and we waited. Every dozen minutes the summit threw a fountain of orange sparks into the dark, sliding down the slope and dying in the water. We watched it from the aft deck for hours, in silence, without the phones that wouldn't have captured it anyway. I've been to Portofino on this series and under the Faraglioni on Capri, and I say this with full responsibility: I've seen nothing in the Mediterranean more impressive than Stromboli erupting at night, watched from the deck of a yacht lying on calm water. It was our Portofino for the week — only with fire.
Day 7 — Back under Etna
The last day is always my favourite moment of the week, and this time was no different. We came calmly back south, under Etna again, in no hurry — coffee on the flybridge, smooth morning water, everyone noticeably quieter and noticeably darker than in Riposto a week earlier. Etna greeted us the way it had seen us off: a lazy plume of smoke over the summit. Stepping ashore, I was already drawing up the list of islands that will get two days instead of one next time. Usually that's the sign a trip went well.
What it costs, and what's worth knowing
EXPLORA — an Azimut 82 Fly, 2026, 24.8 metres, 8 guests in 4 cabins, a crew of 4, stabilisers at anchor and underway, the lowering Deck2Deck platform, and in the garage a Pirelli tender, two Seabob underwater scooters, SUP boards and Awake electric surfboards — charters from €59,000 a week off-peak to €69,000 in High Season 2026, plus VAT and APA of around 30% (roughly €18,000–21,000 for fuel, food, berths and everything you actually use aboard). What exactly sits inside those lines — what APA is, and what a charter bill is really made of — I break down separately on czarterjachtow.com.
And the thing you won't read in any listing: Sicily is a route that gives most to a boat with good stabilisers and the range to cross open water to the Aeolians and back in comfort — not one that has to hug the coast. EXPLORA is built for exactly that. But the same route, laid out without reading the wind and Stromboli's current activity, can miss the very thing you came for. Working out how to arrange it for a particular group in a particular week is precisely the part I bring. You have the map; a guide is still worth having.
Want to sail this route for real? EXPLORA is based in Riposto, Sicily for the 2026 season — the Aeolian Islands, Sardinia, Malta and the Amalfi Coast all within reach. A brand-new yacht's debut season, and the dates go quickly. Tell me when you're sailing and who with, and I'll build the week around you. See this charter →
This is the eighth episode of the "Charter Logbook" series — after the Côte d'Azur, the Balearics, the Cyclades, Dalmatia, Sardinia, the Amalfi Coast and Corsica. In the episodes to come we'll sail on — every route has its own rhythm.