the mom who is also a diver

She Packs The Kids’ Bags All Week.
Then One Bag Is Only Hers.

Yuri first tried scuba diving as a student abroad and never quite let it go. Life filled in around it — a career, a marriage, then two children — and for a stretch she barely got in the water at all. What surprised her was that she didn’t drift away from diving so much as grow into it: with steady guidance from NB Divers, she is now a certified PADI Divemaster who still describes herself, cheerfully, as someone who is “always learning.”

The thing people react to isn’t the certification. It’s the arithmetic. “How do you dive and raise two kids?” she gets asked, usually with genuine disbelief. The honest answer is that it took a few years, a supportive family, and a very deliberate decision that her own hobby was allowed to survive parenthood.

why parents quietly stop

The Hobby Doesn’t Disappear.
It Just Gets Postponed.

Most parents Yuri knows describe the same slow trade. An active hobby becomes a low-energy one, the low-energy one becomes no hobby at all, and somewhere in there the answer to “what do you do for yourself?” quietly becomes “nothing, for now.” It rarely feels like a decision. It just happens, one busy week at a time.

When her children were under two — the age when a parent can’t be gone half a day — she didn’t force it. She kept her hand in with short pool sessions and let her dive gear sit and wait. There is no medal for burning yourself out to prove you’re still “you.” The gear was patient. So was she.

There was a practical worry on top of the scheduling one: after three years away from Korea’s East Sea, she wondered whether her body would still remember the water — whether her buoyancy would hold, whether she’d slow the group down. That fear is real, and it is also completely normal. It is not a reason to quit. It is simply a reason to ease back in properly.

how she actually made it work

Scuba Diving For Busy Moms,
Made Realistic

The turning point was structural, not heroic. As her second child passed two, the goodbyes changed: “Bye, Mom — go take lots of fish photos!” Her husband takes a full day of golf for every full day she dives; fairness, not permission. And the whole family got pulled into the ritual — the kids try on her mask, bite the regulator, ask how a person breathes underwater at all.

To handle the skills worry, she doesn’t just show up at the coast and hope. Before a trip she checks her gear carefully and books pool practice, so the day at sea starts from confidence rather than nerves. Her advice to other parents is refreshingly unglamorous: keep a hobby that pulls you fully out of daily life, protect a small window for it, and treat the preparation as part of the pleasure. A parent who gets to recharge, she is convinced, comes home a better parent.

She also flags the practical stuff honestly. Starting from scratch doesn’t mean buying a wall of equipment first — training gear is available to rent throughout your courses, so you can learn on proper kit and decide what to own later, once you know what you actually love.

the nb divers way

Learn Right,
Enjoy Forever

NB Divers has spent 26 years building divers slowly and in small groups, on the belief that diving is our culture — not a box to tick once. We are not for everyone, only for you: the parent who would rather rebuild a skill calmly in a pool than gamble on remembering it in open water with a group waiting.

That patience is why divers with unpredictable schedules — parents especially — tend to stay. Programs run at different times across the week, so pool practice, training and trips can be fitted around real life instead of the other way around.

Our dive professionals communicate in English, as well as Korean and Japanese — so if you are a parent new to Seoul, or an expat who learned to dive somewhere warmer, you can ask every question in plain English before you ever get wet. When you are ready, Korea’s East Sea coast is where it all comes together, and when the next step calls, we help you level up properly.

the east sea, again

Three Years Away.
Then Home Water Again.

Her comeback dive was in the last week of June on the East Sea, in a drysuit that kept her comfortable and dry in twenty-two-degree water. The bay was full of towering sargassum forests and clouds of juvenile fish. The prep paid off: instead of fighting the ocean, she settled straight into that weightless quiet where the only sounds are her own breathing and the water moving around her.

The bigger change was in her head. She had carried a quiet belief that Korean water was “the hard option.” One good trip — calm, clear, well-guided — rewrote it. Now she comes home from a dive and watches the footage with her kids, telling them what colour the water was and whether it was cold, while they demand that she photograph a shark next time. The dives she used to travel abroad for turned out to be a short drive from home all along.