These South Korean Divers are Some Serious Boss Ladies
LatestIn need of a little Sunday night motivation? Look no further than these South Korean female divers, who are basically the boss bitches of the ocean/like real-life mermaids, but more gangster.
Via The New Yorker:
For hundreds of years, women in the South Korean island province of Jeju have made their living harvesting seafood by hand from the ocean floor. Known as haenyeo, or sea women, they use no breathing equipment, although a typical dive might last around two minutes and take them as deep as ten metres underwater. Wearing old-fashioned headlight-shaped scuba masks, most dive with lead weights strapped around their waists to help them sink faster. A round flotation device called a tewak, about the size of a basketball, sits at the surface of the water with a net hanging beneath it to collect the harvest. Some use a sharp tool to dig conch, abalone, and other creatures from the crevices on the seafloor.
So: no modern equipment to help them swim or navigate the water; weights strapped around their stomach to make sure they don’t rise to the surface (enough to instill panic in just about any person, I’d think); and they’re 10 meters (32 feet, roughly) underwater—all while harvesting seafood that ultimately gets shipped around the world.
I know I keep inserting this PTAF video into my posts about women doing amazing shit, but I can’t help it. These haenyeo are the fucking bomb.
Image via AP
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