Tales from a Whakaari/White Island skipper
He’s seen boulders the size of cars fly from Whakaari’s crater, to a red fiery glow illuminating the night. He’s even spotted a periscope submarine emerging from the dark waters, simply watching.
Where it came from, he couldn’t tell you. But Rick Pollock has seen plenty at Whakaari/White Island.
The experienced charter boat fisherman, who often anchored near the volcano, says it will take a long time for the Eastern Bay community and New Zealand to recover from last week’s eruption.
Pollock believed the tragic event would divide more than just the local community. ‘‘This will divide the country. I can see it already and you can already feel it. I think this is just the beginning of the fallout.’’
Pollock had known Hayden Marshall-Inman, a White Island Tours guide killed in the eruption, since he was 3 years old and described him as one of ‘‘nature’s gentlemen’’.
‘‘He used to travel to America to work at camps for kids. I don’t think he got paid, he just loved it. Then my friend Paul Kingi took him under his wing.’’
Pollock praised his ‘‘humble’’ friend Kingi’s actions in getting people off the island last week.
Kingi had left the island only minutes before the eruption. But he was one of the first back on, rescuing and assisting numerous injured back onto the waiting boats.
‘‘He’s doing incredibly since this all happened, it must have been extremely traumatic.’’
Pollock’s friendship with Kingi is a respected one, describing him as calm, level-headed and one who always wanted to help. ‘‘Paul is the only one I would allow to run my boat when I had to be away.’’
Pollock is no stranger to Whakaari’s volcanic history.
‘‘I’ve got [photo] albums of eruptions like the latest one and bigger. The island virtually is almost exactly 1000 feet high, so when you’re away from it you just watch the mushroom cloud come up.’’
But the strangest thing Pollock witnessed was on a foggy morning.
‘‘I just happened to be looking to the north and then I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, then realised it was a periscope, then a conning tower and then the whole submarine surfaced, it was under a mile away from us.
‘‘Those guys probably got more of a surprise than we did. They’d only just surfaced and then saw us. They disappeared also as fast as they had come up.’’