A Hawaii Lava Tour Boat Got Too Close. Something Taller Than the Cliff Was Standing in the Steam
Off Hawaii's Big Island, a lava tour boat watched a giant silhouette stand in boiling water and drink lava. Then its eyes turned to the boat and the engine died.
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At dusk off the Big Island of Hawaii, a tour boat with twenty-two passengers idled near a lava ocean entry, where molten rock pours off a sea cliff into the Pacific. Captain Keoni Kahale had just announced they were as close as they could safely go when the steam parted and revealed a black, man-shaped silhouette taller than the cliff, standing in boiling water. It bent down and drank the lava like water, its chest glowing orange from inside. Then its burning eyes turned toward the boat, steam blasted from its nostrils, and the engine died.
This is what happened as the boat drifted toward the cliff.
Sixty Seconds
Keoni tried the engine again. Nothing. The heat from the steam jets had flooded the air intake, and the motor only coughed. The boat was drifting on the swell toward the lava, maybe a hundred yards from the glowing wall of the cliff, and getting closer with every wave.
“Everybody get low,” Keoni shouted. “Life jackets on. Now!”
Frank, the retired Chicago firefighter, was already moving. He pulled the kids from the Tokyo family to the far side of the boat and pushed them down behind the bench, and then he did something he had done hundreds of times in his old life. He grabbed the boat’s emergency fire extinguisher and stood between the passengers and the heat.
“I don’t know what good it would have done,” he admitted later. “Habit, I guess. You stand between the fire and the people.”
It Came Closer
The creature began to walk. Each step sent a slow wave rolling across the water and rocked the boat. Lava streamed off its shoulders. The glow in its chest pulsed like a heartbeat. In thirty seconds it had crossed half the distance to the boat, and the temperature on deck climbed until the paint on the railing began to blister.
Maya had not stopped filming. Her video shows the creature looming over the boat, filling the frame, its burning eyes looking down at them from the height of a ten-story building.
Then it stopped. And it reached down.
The Hand in the Water
Everyone on board was sure they were about to die. Maya’s father pulled her against his chest. The honeymooners held hands. The Tokyo grandmother kept praying.
But the enormous black hand did not grab the boat. It sank into the water beside it with a hiss and a burst of steam, and then pushed. A long, steady push. The boat slid backward across the water, away from the cliff, away from the lava, faster than its engines could ever have carried it. Two hundred yards. Three hundred. Out of the steam and into the cool blue evening air.
Then the hand withdrew.
The creature stood upright again and looked at them across the water for a long moment. Its eyes dimmed slightly, from the white of a torch to a deep, soft orange, like embers. Then it turned, walked back into the boiling sea at the foot of the lava flow, and sank down until only the glow of its chest showed beneath the surface. Then that faded too, and there was only steam.
What Keoni’s Grandfather Said
The engine started on the next try. Nobody spoke on the ride back to the harbor. When the boat finally tied up at the dock, the Tokyo grandmother bowed deeply to the sea before she stepped off.
Keoni sat in the empty boat for a long time afterward. He later told Maya’s father something he had never told any passenger. His grandfather, a fisherman from the Puna coast, used to say that the land on the Big Island was still being made, and that whoever was making it did not like to be disturbed while working. But they were not cruel. “If you get too close,” his grandfather told him, “they’ll send you home. Just don’t come back.”
“I always thought he meant the lava,” Keoni said. “Now I think he meant something else.”
A New Line on the Card
Keoni still runs lava tours when the flow is active. He has moved the distance on his laminated card back by a hundred yards. Frank sends him a Christmas card every year with a small drawing of a fire extinguisher.
And Maya, the girl who wouldn’t look up from her phone, did not post her video for almost a month. When she finally did, she wrote only one line under it: “We were guests in someone’s home. They were kind enough to walk us to the door.”
More Stories Like This
If this one gave you chills, read our other true-to-life ocean encounters: the lighthouse keeper whose foghorn got an answer, the Alaska tour boat that saw something frozen in a glacier, and the oyster farmer who found his cages emptied and the shells sorted by size. The sea keeps its secrets. Sometimes, for a moment, it lets one go.
