Paddling at the base of spewing Lava: video

I’ve had an interest in lava and volcanoes since a young age. Although after experiencing it first-hand, a lava waterfall was truly a natural phenomenon beyond words.

It started off as an idea we had talked about amongst friends, and then after a couple phone calls things started to come together to make this dream turn into fruition.

The day of started off with an early morning drive to the harbor to meet up with our boat captain and drive to the point where the lava actually flows into the ocean. We got to watch an epic sunrise while loading up our boat and then we were off and on our way.

On our way we came across of pod of spinner dolphins, which was very impressive to watching the dolphins jump into the air and pull of 720 twists before landing back into the ocean. After watching the dolphins I asked if whale appearances were frequent or not, our captain said that it is pretty rare to see the wale especially at this time of the season. Though only minutes later we had to shut down our engines as a mother and baby whale both popped up beside our boat. It was turning into an amazing day before we even made it to the lava.

It was obvious we were getting closes we saw the giant plumb of steam from the molten lava hitting the ocean currents. Once at a safe distance Kalob, Dane, Rafa, and myself launched our kayaks into the ocean and started paddling towards the lava to get a unique and closer experience.

It was extremely obvious not to get too close as the lava was literally exploding when hitting the much cooler ocean water. We paddled around for just over 30 minutes as we all just watched in awe and witnessed molten lava spew out of the earth. The lava gave off quite a bit of heat and the ocean currents were also extremely hot, with some areas literally boiling. Pieces of cooling lava would float by, while more would continually explode into the air.

We eventually had to pack up and head back out to shore, though our experience wasn’t over yet. The dolphin pod had met back up with us and followed/lead us home. Our captain was super rad and let us hangout on the bow of the boat while the dolphins would jump up and almost touch us.

The whole experience was beyond words. Here is a little video while paddling with the lava.

Nick