It's a real love hate relationship. That's because she can be moody, unpredictable and difficult to live with.

But John ‘Tuna' Baker is loving and forgiving and that's why he keeps being drawn back to ‘her' – to White Island – that constant reminder off the Whakatane coast that we are very much at the whim of Mother Nature.

John ‘Tuna' Baker – the Mayor of White Island. Photo by Bruce Barnard.

'She can be amazing or she can be hell – there's not too much middle ground.”

Even White Island's name – Te Puia o Whakaari – ‘that which can be made visible' – points to a difficult disposition.

One day it will be all aggressive and malevolent, steaming, smoking and belching on the horizon. The very next it will sulk and disappear into the haze.

'It has its moods alright – a very moody place.”

John has spent much of his working life in, under and around the submarine volcano.

As a professional fisher, diver and charter operator he has more of an attachment to the 1300 metres of White Island below sea level.

But he's also had some near-death experiences above the tide at White Island.

'It was Anniversary Day 1985 or 1986.”

A real life drama from a man who tells it as it is.

'A couple of guys were snorkelling, I was down in the boat when I heard boom, boom, boom.

'When that thing explodes she goes really off. I was bending over to lift the anchor to make our escape when hot scoria ash rained down and scorched my back.”

It gave an unflappable man a big fright.

'Oh yes – she has frightened me a few times,” he admits. And frightened other's before him.

Claude Sarich, a sulphur miner on White Island in 1931-1932 was more graphic.

He wrote of Whakaari as 'the worst hell on earth – a place where rocks exploded, where teeth went black if they weren't cleaned three times a day, and where the land shook violently”.

You don't read that in the tour blurbs, so why go out there? One-hundred tourists a day, flirting with a nature at her most unpredictable.

For a start they can't legally be stopped from landing or sightseeing from a boat.

And it's one of the most fascinating and accessible volcanoes on earth – it's a kind of adventure tourism, extreme adventure tourism.

They're all at risk. They just take their chances,” says John. They take their chances with a live volcano.

And also because it's a 'pretty place that changes every day,” according to John. A ‘pretty' place that's also a menacing cauldron of molten lava and heavy clouds of suffocating sulphurous smoke and steam that has claimed 11 lives.

White Island's been of that mind ever since Captain Cook wandered past on October 1, 1769 – probably longer, probably 16,000 years – rumbling, roaring, smoking, forever threatening.

Scientists quaintly call it 'an alert level rating of 1” or 'constantly active”.

John put a Reuters photographer ashore in a dinghy one day. 'We were just about to send out a search party for him when he turned up with his mouth wide open and 400 pictures in his camera.

'He said ‘I have just been to the moon and back'. He was blown away. It's kind of like that.”

Baker has come in from the sea, retired after nearly 50 years of fishing and diving. But his respect for Whakaari is deep, his nerves a bit frayed and the stories forever vivid.

'I have been dumped on five times by eruptions, pebbles, rocks and ash. Twice I have scuttled away from the island because it was getting ‘aggro'. It was pretty scary.”

Like lava, the stories of a volcano getting ‘stroppy' start to flow.

'I was coming up from a dive and couldn't see. I thought I had accidentally swum under a rock.

'The island was erupting, the sun was blocked out and molten scoria was falling into the water around me.

'And I struggled to breathe because of the gas and stuff. Spooky stuff.” Definitely spooky John.

There was another night when the magma blasted straight into the night sky – again spectacular, again scary, again they survived.

'But it doesn't put me off.” It probably only feeds his fondness and respect for White Island, Te Puia o Whakaari.

'It's a chance thing.”

And the ‘chance thing' is the adventurer thing that still lingers in John Baker.