After almost two years in Korea I got to go diving. Diving is immensely popular here in the land of the morning calm and especially so here in the clean waters of
Sokcho. You cannot throw a stone without hitting a dive shop around here. Every weekend in the spring, summer, and early fall, you can see groups of beginners, like me, and experts heading out to dive the beaches and off shore here in
Sokcho.
The main reason that the northern part of South Korea is such a hot dive area is not the coral, there isn't any, but the fact that visibility here is excellent. On our dive we could see from 15 to twenty meters.
Starting out the day did not look very promising with grey skies and light rain as we headed down to Kings Dive Shop in Yang-Yang to get kitted out and meet our new friend Kim Dong
Il who would be our dive master for this trip.
For this trip we headed down to a small village just south of town to a little dive shop, which, amazingly on such a crappy day was positively loaded with divers all getting there gear together for the days activities.
As we helped Dong
Il carry our gear to the small dive shop I could not help but feel almost totally out of place with all the other people around. I felt pretty much out of my league here being such a rank beginner but everyone made me feel right at home.
After taking a few minutes to get geared up, putting on our wet suits, booties, and gloves we moved outside to do tank checks and look over all our equipment. This is very important as all this gear we would wear in fifty feet of water would do its best to keep us alive, but only if we double and triple checked it to make sure that everything worked correctly.
After checking our gear we moved towards the dock to board the large Zodiac inflatable that would take us a mile off shore to the dive site.
The guys on the boat were really a bunch of tough guys. Lots of them sported tats, rare in Korea, and you could tell that it would not be very wise to mess with them, but they were really cool, telling me that I looked just like a dive master sitting in front, looking all cool and calm in my wet suit, little did they know that I was pretty damn nervous about making a fool of myself in front of all these professional looking types.
After a good ride through some pretty heavy waves we reached the dive flags and put on our fins,
BCD's and masks, and after a few minutes of trouble from the rookie, me, we were ready to head down into the deep.
As I back rolled off the boat I felt a little twinge of panic, "what the hell am I doing, water
isn't for humans", but as I
deflated my
BCD and started to sink all of the old fears drifted away as I was busy equalizing the pressure on my ears, checking my ears, motioning for Dong
Il to tighten up my
BCD and doing all the usual tasks one has to do to dive safely and before I knew it I bumped my knee into a big kelp covered rock at about forty feet.
The
scenery on the bottom was pretty cool and because of the excellent visibility you could see a lot of things. The bottom was a mix of big rocks covered with a ton of seaweed and hard sand bottom. We saw a few fish, a
speckled flounder like flatfish, and a
really pretty blue one one that was almost neon bright, a ton of
cockles, and one pair of old
fisherman's pants that Dong
Il blue up with compressed air.
After about twenty five minutes our air was pretty used up and we headed up slowly to out gas the nitrogen that had built up in our bodies and finally broke the surface after about forty minutes and bobbed in the ocean waiting for the boat to pick us up.
Pictures-
1. Jason,
Kirsty, and Dong
Il looking over the gear before our dive
2. Our
BCD's with tanks
attached ready for our dive
3. Diving is
truly an
international sport, these dive flags mean the same here as they do everywhere.
4. While on the bottom Dong
Il picked up some sea ginseng, "good for health" he told me and urged me to dig in. Chewy and tasting of nothing but salt it was something I tried once, but never again.
5. Our feast spread out before us!
These are some pictures of Hwamsaa temple, a little visited part of rural Korea that was originally built around 1509. It lies about five miles outside of town and you can only reach it by car or by foot and since I don't have a car...................
