“The temperature gauge!” the mate screamed, pointing at the dashboard. I looked down to see the needle for the engine water intake climbing into the red zone.
The ocean wasn’t just filled with rocks; it was heating up. “Shut down the intake!” I barked. “We’ll burn the engine up!” We were drifting dead in the water, surrounded by miles of floating stone, sitting on top of a heating element. A large bubble, ten feet wide, broke the surface near the bow with a heavy, wet glug. It released a cloud of yellow gas that made my eyes water immediately. The ocean was beginning to boil. I realized then that the “shoal” wasn’t just a hazard; it was a warning sign we had ignored.
“Hoist the sails!” I yelled. “We need wind, the engine is useless!” We scrambled across the deck, slipping on the wet pumice stones that had washed aboard. My hands bled as I hauled on the halyard, the rough ropes biting into my skin.
“Hoist the sails!” I yelled. “We need wind, the engine is useless!” We scrambled across the deck, slipping on the wet pumice stones that had washed aboard. My hands bled as I hauled on the halyard, the rough ropes biting into my skin.
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We had made it maybe two hundred yards when the color of the water changed again. This time, it didn’t turn grey; it turned a terrifying, vibrant turquoise.
Where our keel had cut through the stones, a strip of clear water was widening rapidly. It wasn’t just that we were moving away; the water behind us was being pushed apart. A low rumble began to vibrate through the soles of my deck shoes.
“Hold on to something!” I screamed, wrapping my arm around the pedestal of the wheel. The rumbling grew into a roar that drowned out the wind and the grinding stones. The ocean surface behind us, where we had been sitting minutes ago, began to dome upward.
It defied physics, a mountain of water rising smoothly from the flat sea. The floating pumice field slid off the sides of the water-mountain like a tablecloth being pulled. The fear was so absolute I couldn’t move; I just watched the impossible unfold. We were witnessing the birth of something violent and ancient.
The dome of water shattered. A column of steam and black ash shot thousands of feet into the sky in a fraction of a second.
The shockwave hit us moments later, a wall of wind that nearly capsized the sloop. “Get down!” I yelled, throwing myself over the mate as debris began to rain from the sky. Chunks of hot rock hissed as they hit the water around us, creating mini geysers of steam. We watched through the falling ash as the white steam cleared. A dark, jagged shape was rising from the churning whitewater, growing taller by the second. An island was being born right before our eyes, violent and steaming.
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Had we stayed in that spot for five more minutes, we would be on top of that peak. We sailed in silence for hours, watching the plume of smoke dominate the horizon behind us. The new island stood dark and jagged against the setting sun, a monument to the power beneath us. I looked at the pumice stone still sitting on the cockpit floor.
We had treated the ocean like a highway, forgetting it is a living, shifting beast. The “sandbank” was the Earth taking a breath before it screamed. I kicked the stone overboard and watched it float away. Some discoveries are beautiful, but some are just the universe telling you that you are very, very small.
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