Halona Blowhole Oahu Ceramic Art Tile
— the place the sea breathes out.
Not only on a wall.
“A roadside lookout on Kalanianaole Highway, halfway between Hanauma Bay and Sandy Beach. The blowhole is a collapsed lava tube. The south swell rolls in, finds the opening, and the sea sends a column of water thirty feet up. The cove below is the From Here to Eternity beach, the long kiss in the sand from 1953. Locals call the whole coast Ka Iwi, the bones. Tour vans stop for ten minutes and move on. From December to May the humpbacks pass offshore. Best at high tide, with the wind out of the south.
Halona Blowhole Oahu Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Halona Blowhole sits on the Ka Iwi coast at the southeast corner of Oahu, along Kalanianaole Highway about ten miles east of Waikiki. The lookout faces Halona Beach Cove, a small pocket of sand reached by a steep scramble down volcanic rock. The whole stretch from Hanauma Bay through Sandy Beach Park to Makapuʻu Point is part of the Ka Iwi State Scenic Shoreline, a seven-mile rugged coast of basalt cliffs formed from the Koko Crater Tuff Cone. *Hālona* is Hawaiian for *peering place*. The site has a paved pull-off and is one of the standard stops on the southeast Oahu circuit driven by every tour operator on the island.
The blowhole is a relic of Oahu's volcanic origin: a lava tube whose seaward end opens just below the waterline, and whose roof has collapsed into a vertical shaft maybe eight feet across. When the south swell runs, the incoming wave compresses air and water into the tube, and the only place for the column to go is up. On a strong day the spout reaches thirty feet. On a calm day the hole is silent, with only a slow gargle of swell returning. The mechanism is identical to the Nakalele Blowhole on Maui and Spouting Horn on Kauai, though Halona is the most accessible from a major city.
There is no fee. The pull-off has a small paved lot directly off Highway 72; on weekends and during tour-bus hours the lot fills and overflow parks along the shoulder. The lookout itself is a fenced platform a short walk from the car. The cove below is reachable by an informal trail down lava rock, but the route is unmarked and the rock is sharp. Signs at the site warn against climbing the cliff for a closer view of the spout; the rocks here have killed visitors who got too close. From December through May, humpback whales pass within sight of the lookout, on the migration corridor between Maui and the Alaskan feeding grounds.