June 4-5 2016   Brimstone, lava and auklets! 

Yankicha - sulphur and steam

I wimped out of joining the shore party the next day to the island of Simushir. The weather was better but the swells were still large. Getting up and down the gangway, which cunningly masquerades as a ladder, and climbing in and out of the zodiacs in clumping great gum boots, carrying your 'stuff' and togged up to the eyeballs in full wet weather gear is hard enough, but with a swell of a couple of metres and the time between swells not long enough to allow for any wrong steps or slips - forget it! What a wuss - I had also injured a rib and had a bit if pain (don't ask), but that sealed the deal for me.  As it turned out, after three attempts only one boat got to shore, one boat got loaded but had to turn back and those watching and waiting to board very wisely decided against it.  It was disappointing as the landing was to be in a flooded caldera, the island of Simushir.

Exploring within the drowned caldera of Yankicha

So we moved to the Plan B which turned out to be spectacular which had us doubling back to Yankicha, another flooded caldera. We disembarked very late afternoon to take a stroll through a field of vents belching sulphurous fumes straight from the centre of the earth I am certain!  You could almost hear the flames licking, the lava bubbling and the fiends screeching for you to come step into their world. OK, so it wasn't quite like that, but peering into those dark yellow-encrusted holes was eerie not to mention a little hard on the lungs. The crust was thin in places so you had to be a bit careful where you put your feet. Quite awesome really!

This is Leonid. I learnt much about the islands and their vegetation from him.

Then we piled back into the zodiacs to cruise around the caldera as the light was fading and the cute little auklets - crested and whiskered - started their massed flight into the caldera to roost for the night.  Looking up all one could see were millions of birds layer upon layer, turning and soaring in great dark feathered-clouds like swarms of midges above and around you and way out to sea.  We stayed for hours it seemed watching them chattering with each other, squabbling over spots to sit, and eventually hopping up or flying to their burrows which pock-marked the entire inside of the caldera.  And still they kept coming. The seething mass of birds provided a wonderful 'eat all you want' smorgasbord for the large gulls and Arctic foxes who just picked them off at will. Some of the gulls caught them mid air, some stole their prey from other gulls mid air or plucked single birds from among a cluster of birds straight off the rocks.  It was an astonishing and ghastly performance. We returned to ship for a very later dinner - 10pm, but it was worth it.

A whiskered auklet.  Absolutely adorable

We saw real live lava!!

It was now early Sunday morning and we were anchored off Chirpoy, place of living breathing moving lava - that day at least! There had been reports that the volcano had been erupting but they weren't sure if it was still active so a small party went out very early in the morning to check it out. We got the green flag and we were away, a small flotilla of black rubber heading for the lava flow. First we simply saw old lava flows ragged, sharp and craggy. We passed towering cliffs spotted with nesting kittiwakes and then rounded a point and ..... wow!

At the edge of the flow - rock and ash tumbling into the sea 

We were confronted by a huge smoking crumbling 'cliff' about 30-40 meters high extending about a kilometre. It was a wall of smoking rock - black, brown, reddish brown. Every 5 minutes or so a section would collapse into the sea creating great clouds of steam and smoke filling the air with sulphurous fumes and rending the air like thunder. It was mighty! Awesome! A once in a life time kind of thing. We got our fill of it - almost! But eventually we had to leave and headed back to the ship flying across quite choppy seas, getting doused with spray as we smashed through the waves, but buoyed up with the wonder of seeing the earth move so to speak, trying to imagine the force that kept pushing billions of tons of rock into the sea. We worry about rising sea levels - here we saw it live with the added dimension of tons of green house gasses being released into the atmosphere. Words fail me!