Fairly soon we discovered brown grainy streaks in the water. It looked like heavy oil mixed with water. The surrounding water was strangely greenish, like a lagoon, not the deep bluish color that you normally see sailing offshore. As we got further southwest, the streaks turned into heavy brands of floating matter, until the whole horizon was a solid line that looked like a desert.
So far we didn't have a problem, as it was such a thin layer on the surface that it got pushed away by the bow wave, but when we entered the solid field it started to pile up and behaved like wet concrete. The sight was unbelievable; it looked like rolling sand dunes as far as the eye could see. Our speed went from 7 knots down to 1 knots as the pumice stones dragged along the waterline.
We turned around as quickly as we could and headed back the same way we came, toward clear water. As we hit clear water, we turned off the engine and figured out that it must have come from a volcanic eruption somewhere near. we were too far from land to contact anyone on the VHF radio, so our only options were either to sail south along the pumice rafts or to head back to the island. I wanted to make sure that everything was OK with the boat before heading off for a longer passage, so we decided to head back toward land and anchor for the night.
We motored out early the next morning heading south southwest until we encountered the pumice rafts and sailed along them until they were so broken up that we could safely steer through them. We collected a few stones, some as big as a soccer ball, but the bigger they were the more brittle they were, and with the motion of the sailboat they eventually broke into pieces.
Soon we could make out that one of the clouds on the horizon wasn't a cloud but actually a smoke stack from the active volcano, The two areas of volcanic activity in the area are Metis shoal and Home reef and the smoke came from the Home reef area. We were planning to sail south of both these areas, but curiosity overcame us and we headed toward the southern part of Home reef. The closer we came to the island, the clearer the smoke stood out from the surroundings clouds, and every so often a massive black pillar shot upward toward the sky. You could see particles raining down.
As the wind was pushing the volcanic smoke to the northwest, we decided to go in a bit closer. While the sun was going down, we motored up to within 1 nautical miles of the island. Later, I put the coordinates to be 18°59.5 S and 174°46.3 W. The island was smoldering with steam, but it was possible to get a good picture of it.
You could clearly see the three mounds creating a crater with one side breaking off and opening up toward the sea. It looked like a big island made of black coal. We reached down and felt the water and it was warmer. Our concern at the time was to sail away from the island before it got too dark, as we didn't know if we would run into more pumice rafts.
When we were leaving Fiji in the middle of September, we heard on the radio an account of the pumice drifting up on beaches in Fiji. I have been told by another scientist at NASA that sometimes these island do "Disappear" with time as wind and wave action break them down. But the island that we found still shows up clearly on a satellite photo taken in the middle of October, so who knows.
The image from NASA taken in August shows the new island partially hidden by the plume of smoke erupting from the volcano. The pumice can clearly seen.
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