When Kelsey Waghorn escaped the Whakaari/White Island eruption with her life, it was her second near-death experience - and she was still only 25.
Waghorn was one of 25 people seriously injured in the 2019 volcanic eruption that killed 22 others.
And three years earlier in January 2016, when she was only 22, she had survived another crisis: an inferno that engulfed a tour boat she was working on, while it was off the Bay of Plenty coastline.
In Waghorn’s newly-released book - Surviving White Island - she has described the day the vessel PeeJay V made its way through a “white-capped grey swell” as she and other White Island Tours crew members started investigating something that smelt “hot”.
She and workmate and friend Hayden Marshall-Inman – who later lost his life in the Whakaari/White Island eruption – discovered “dirty, dark-grey smoke billowing out behind the fridge and freezer”, the book says.
Some passengers remained calm, while others had their eyes wide with fear, she wrote.
“Flames were visible now. Looking down the side of the boat, I could see them consistently rising from the aft deck. They were also starting to shoot out of the engine-room vents,” Waghorn wrote.
As the flames spread quickly, lifejackets were handed around passengers and crew and inflatable boats were deployed in the water alongside Peejay V.
Several other vessels – including another White Island Tours ship – rushed to the area off the coastline as the stricken boat’s captain “gave the command to abandon ship”, Waghorn wrote.
There were about 60 crew and passengers on board.
“I returned to the passengers on the bow. ‘All right, guys,’ I said. ‘Bad news is, we will be jumping off the boat. Good news is, we have two of the most experienced inflatable-boat drivers waiting down there to pick you up straight away. Who’s first?’.
“Some passengers couldn’t get off the boat fast enough, but others were clearly uneasy about having us jump into the ocean from the bow of a rolling boat; a couple of metres above the churning water.
“Some said they couldn’t swim.”
During the rescue mission, passengers and crew who jumped into the heavy seas were then hauled on to one of the inflatable boats, then ferried to the nearby vessels that had rushed to the scene. Everyone survived.
According to Waghorn, the inferno onboard was intense by the time she was able to jump to safety.
“I could hear the cabin windows smashing as the flames grew hotter and closer, and the smoke billowing out of the back of the boat was thick and black,” she wrote in Surviving White Island.
“Time to go.”
Waghorn says she was the second-to-last person to take the plunge off the boat, followed by the skipper of Peejay V.
The ship was destroyed by the fire and sank into the ocean.
After returning to shore, numerous survivors talked to the Herald about the blaze - and their fears on the day that they weren’t going to survive.
One survivor said the leap to safety was “like jumping off a double decker bus”.
“It was a miracle that we got off alive,” Sue Odom said.
>> Surviving White Island, by Kelsey Waghorn, is published by HarperCollins and has a RRP of $39.99.
Neil Reid is a Napier-based senior reporter who covers general news, features and sport. He joined the Herald in 2014 and has 34 years of newsroom experience. He has covered the Whakaari/White Island tragedy, and its ongoing impacts, at length.
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