the diver everybody warned

Everyone Had A Story
About The Cold

Rena Park teaches freediving and mermaid diving. She has competed and placed in national mermaid competitions, and she finishes her working day in a pool the way most people finish theirs on a sofa. Underwater is where she is comfortable. On scuba, though, she is still a Rescue Diver — two years in, and honest about how far she has to go.

She had freedived Korea’s East Sea many times. She had never scuba dived it. And before her first trip with us, everyone she knew had an opinion about it. The East Sea water temperature is like this. The visibility is like that. You’ll be cold. You won’t see anything. The stories piled up, and none of them agreed with each other.

“I wanted to know who was right,” she said. So she decided to stop listening and go find out — to compare the East Sea she knew on one breath with the East Sea everyone else described.

what she was actually worried about

Two Fears, One Shrug

Her two real concerns were temperature and visibility. She had never breathed compressed air in this sea, and a first dive in unfamiliar conditions deserves a little nervousness. Everything else, she treated lightly. The news was full of reports of sharks appearing as seas warm; her plan, if she met one, was to shake its hand. Statistically she is not wrong — the number of people bitten by sharks is vanishingly small.

So she prepared instead of worrying. She tried a 6mm Fourth Element RF2 suit in the pool to feel how it moved and how it held heat. She had trained for her Rescue course in Jeju the previous winter, in water around 20°C, and reasoned that if she could handle that, she could handle a little shivering here. Visibility she left alone entirely — she had seen this sea before. What she felt instead, quietly, was excitement about which creatures would turn up.

That is the difference between a nervous diver and a prepared one. A prepared diver does not need the sea to be predictable. She just needs to have done the work beforehand.

the number that ended the argument

22°C, And Not
A Single Shiver

Here is what the East Sea water temperature actually did on her trip: it sat at an average of around 22°C, and she was never once cold. The waves, she said with a straight face, were about minus half a metre — a sea so flat it was almost embarrassing. Visibility came in better than she had feared, good enough to bring home photographs she was proud of.

Then she found what she had come for. The sargassum forest: tall seaweed swaying in the current, and a diver drifting through it, brushing the fronds, grooming the forest like a cat. She turned around and her buddies were exactly where they should be. That is the part she remembers — not that the water was warm, but that she never had to think about anything except the sea in front of her.

Warm water cannot grow a sargassum forest. This is not a consolation prize for divers who cannot afford a flight south. It is a landscape you can only see here.

why the trip felt easy

The Sea Is Half Of It.
The People Are The Rest.

“Where I go matters less than who I meet there,” Rena said. On this trip she was paired with buddies she had never met before — strangers at the car park, a team by the first descent. She described it as comfortable and steady from beginning to end.

There is no mystery to why. The group stayed tight the way the briefing asked. The dive leader kept the plan honest and the pace unhurried. Professional divers sat in the water behind her, which is what let her spend her attention on the seaweed instead of on her own position. Nothing went wrong — and nothing going wrong is not luck. It is the shape of a dive that was planned properly before anyone got wet.

That is what a small group buys you. Not comfort for its own sake, but the freedom to look around.

what she took home

The Rumour Was
Half Wrong

Rena has now dived all three of Korea’s seas, on scuba and on a single breath. Her verdict on the reputation Korean water carries — cold, dangerous, frightening — is that the rumour is about half right, and the wrong half is the one everybody repeats.

What she found instead, and what any diver here finds once, was this:

• Sargassum forests and seaweed-covered artificial reefs you will not see in a warm sea
• White sand beaches with schools of native fish flashing silver in the light
• The particular joy of recognising a fish you know by name — she has nearly lost a buddy to that distraction
• An East Sea water temperature in early summer that asks far less of you than the stories suggest

Korea’s sea is not a lesser version of somewhere tropical. It has its own character, and it is worth diving on its own terms. She is already planning the next one.

And her advice, after all of it, was about the suit rather than the sea: wear one matched to the water you are actually in. Keep your body warm and you can enjoy any ocean on this planet.

the nb divers way

Learn Right,
Enjoy Forever

For twenty-six years NB Divers has taught divers in small groups, close enough to see, because diving is our culture rather than a product we move. We are not for everyone, only for you: the diver who would rather test a rumour in the water than repeat it on land.

Our dive professionals communicate in English, as well as Korean and Japanese — so if you are an expat in Seoul who has been told the local sea is not worth it, you can ask every question in plain English and then go check for yourself. While you train with us, gear is available to rent, so you can try the right suit for the water. Start where the sea starts on our Dive Korea page, or level up properly when you want to go further.