A group of women take the air along a coast . The urine ’s dusty , but they rend on their goggles , shrug into lead - weighted slopped suits and Virginia Wade in wearing flippers . They go away beneath the water and embark on a complimentary dive to the ocean level , capturingsea urchinsby helping hand . It ’s winter on the diminutive Korean island of Jeju , which means the sea urchins are plentiful . For hours , the charwoman agilely and expeditiously harvest ocean creatures while the air above the waterline hovers around 30 degrees Fahrenheit ( negative 1 degree Anders Celsius ) . These are thehaenyeo — the " sea women " of South Korea . And they are a dying breed .
Thehaenyeo(sometimes transliterated as haenyo ) dive for abalone , clam , seaweed , sea cucumber , sea urchin and calamari without the aid of aviation tank . To do so , they deign up to 65 foot ( 19 meters ) below the H2O ’s surface and hold their breath for two instant , sometimes more . Many have been diving since they were 7 year old , progressing toaegi haenyeo(baby ocean women ) at 15 , and then perfect their avocation well into their 80 .
People have gathered shelled brute from the sea for age , and the dive custom on Jeju can be traced to the 5th century C.E. But female divers were noted in modern record for thefirst timein the 17th one C . By the eighteenth century , diving was a profession primarily made up of women — at least on Jeju — either because there were particularly proficient at withstanding the cool water , because it was an effective style to avoid the taxis applied to manful divers , or both , according to historians .
innocent diving on Jeju went on to become the sole terrain of the haenyeo , who call what they do " muljil " — water body of work — and assign diver three dissimilar social rank accord to proportional skill . The practice is interchangeable to the sponge diver in Greece , shell divers in Australia , and pearl loon in the South Pacific and Japan . However , the Korean haenyeo today are one of the few groups that cover to shun oxygen tank in party favor ofholding their breathing spell .
And the woman who do continue to dive in the traditional manner are fewer still ; the number of haenyeo peaked in the 1960s at about 23,000 . In 2014,84 percentof existing haenyeo divers were old than 60 , and there are headache that younger women will not keep the once - moneymaking professing going . But even as the tradition appear to be fading , global interestingness is reaching new heights .
Groups of tourists are regularly kiss to see the women dive , an aftereffect of opening aHaenyeo Museumon Jeju in 2006 ; nine years later , the Jeju authorities spent $ 6.5 million aimed at preserving the custom , paying for wet courtship and insurance policy , among other things . And in 2016,UNESCOdesignated haenyeo a Cultural Heritage of Humanity . As the haenyeo are valued as a national hoarded wealth , supporters hope the focal point also will change to conservation of oceanic resource .
For more on haenyeo , and to see the iconic divers in action mechanism , watch this UNESCO video :
