the complaints we never hear

The Complaints We
Never Hear

“I couldn’t swim well, and I got scolded for it.” “I was cold the entire course.” “I asked for a refund when it wasn’t working out, and they said no.” We hear these stories often — almost always from divers who trained somewhere else first, and found their way to us afterward.

Nobody has ever said those words about a course led by Charlie Jung, the PADI Course Director who founded NB Divers. That is not an accident, and it is not luck. It is the direct result of a teaching philosophy built over twenty-six years, refined one nervous student and one honest conversation at a time.

This is the story of how that philosophy came to be — and why it still shapes every course we teach today.

the person behind the philosophy

Twenty-Six Years,
One Course Director

NB Divers operates out of Korea’s first PADI 5 Star Career Development Center — the highest tier PADI awards a dive center, reserved for those that meet the strictest requirements for instructor training and offer real career and business support to graduates.

Charlie Jung earned his PADI instructor rating in 1999. In 2006, he became the youngest PADI Course Director in Korea at the time — the highest teaching rating PADI offers — and has since personally trained more than 970 dive professionals. Alongside teaching, he works as a professional underwater photographer, with work published through National Geographic and collaborations with Red Bull and the Mariana Islands Visitors Authority.

Credentials fill a wall — EFR Instructor Trainer, TecDeep Instructor Trainer, GUE/UTD Tec 2 Diver, TDI/NAUI Cave Diver, DAN Oxygen Provider Instructor, over 6,000 logged dives since 1995 — but none of them explain why students who arrive anxious leave calm. For that, you have to go back to where it started.

how it started, off the coast of dokdo

A Dive At Dokdo
Changed Everything

Charlie learned to dive almost by accident — a senior at university suggested he try it, and he did. Not long after, a local marine research institute offered him a rare opportunity during a school break: a diving trip to Dokdo, off Korea’s eastern coast.

What he found underwater was almost impossible to describe: water so clear it felt untouched by human hands, fish that studied the divers with open curiosity rather than fleeing them, an entire ecosystem that had simply been left alone. It was wild, unfiltered, and beautiful in a way that made him want to protect it — and to show it to other people.

That single dive sent him overseas to train as a scuba instructor. He did not know yet that it would become his life’s work. That certainty came later, underwater, in a very different kind of dive.

the day the ocean stopped keeping score

Underwater,
Nobody Has A Disability

Early in his career, Charlie led a scuba experience for a group from a disability organization. Among them were divers who were deaf, and one diver who was blind. What he witnessed changed the direction of his entire career.

Underwater, the deaf divers in the group communicated exactly as they did on land — freely, easily, in their own language. In a world with no sound at all, they were more at ease than Charlie was; he was the one who couldn’t speak. Later, on a sandy stretch of seafloor, the diver who was blind scooped up a handful of sand and let it run slowly through his fingers. Afterward, Charlie asked him why. “On land, sand sticks to your hands and you have to brush it off,” he said. “Down here, no matter how much you touch it, nothing sticks.”

Two divers, two completely different ways of experiencing the same water — and both entirely valid. Charlie realized the ocean carries no prejudice and draws no boundaries between who deserves to feel free in it. From that day, his mission became building a world without prejudice or boundaries, through scuba diving. NB Divers was built to carry that mission on land, one course at a time.

at your own pace, always safe

Your Speed.
Not Ours.

Scuba diving is built on the buddy system, and we teach that principle from the very first lesson: you help each other, always. In practice, that means we shape the course around the diver in front of us, not a fixed schedule.

• Weaker swimmers get more time in the water, not a rushed pass-through
• Anxious students train one-on-one, at a pace that respects their comfort
• We never advertise by-the-hour training — because real confidence doesn’t run on a clock
• Every student is covered by dedicated diving insurance, in case the unexpected happens

This is also why you won’t hear one particular sentence from an NB Divers graduate: “I got yelled at because I was slow.” Slow is simply where some divers start. Our job is to meet them there.

the difference between cool and cold

We Chase Cool.
We Avoid Cold.

“Cool” and “cold” sound similar, but they are opposites. Cool is the feeling of eating ice cream — refreshing, welcome, enjoyable. Cold is the feeling of being genuinely uncomfortable, the kind of discomfort that makes people quietly quit diving after one bad experience.

We train every student in premium cold-water drysuits from Fourth Element, so Korea’s water — genuinely colder than the tropical destinations most people picture when they hear “scuba diving” — stays on the “cool” side of that line, in every season. A diver who is shivering cannot focus on buoyancy, or breathing, or the reef in front of them. A diver who is comfortable can focus on all three.

before you spend a single won

Clarity Before
Commitment

Before your course begins, we walk through the full schedule and full cost together, then build your training plan around it. Nothing is left for you to discover later. If your plan needs to change once training has started — and life does happen — we adjust with you.

Because we teach something that involves real risk underwater, we only proceed when both instructor and student are in the right condition to train. If personal circumstances mean you cannot continue partway through, we work out a partial refund. And if, before certification is issued, you feel the course simply wasn’t right for you, we refund it in full. We would rather lose a sale than keep a student who isn’t genuinely satisfied.

the nb divers way

Learn Right,
Enjoy Forever

Diving is our culture — not a one-time transaction, and not a service we rush people through. We say openly that we are not for everyone, only for you: the diver who would rather learn properly, at their own pace, than get a card as fast and cheaply as possible.

Our dive professionals communicate in English, as well as Korean and Japanese — so if you are an expat living in Seoul, or simply more comfortable learning in English, every part of your course, from your first question to your certification card, happens in plain English. If you are ready to begin, you can start diving with us, and when the time comes for your next certification, we will help you level up properly, too.