“Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back,” she warned the gathering. “In this world, in the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life. We are crossing between life and death every day.”
I recently read The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See and it opened my eyes to whole new world and culture. It made me think about Blue Mind and I really liked the fact that their skills and their love for the ocean is passed from generation to generation. The sea is like a mother to the people of this island, it gave them life and it keeps giving them a livelihood.
Meet the sea women of Jeju. The haenyeo represent feminine strength and resilience as a self sufficient sisterhood of diving mothers and grandmothers. Haenyeo roughly translates into ‘Women of the Sea,’ and these free divers are treated like heroes by the people of Jeju island. For these women, diving is a way of life.
The island of Jeju, situated 53 miles to the south of mainland Korea, is home to the Haenyeo women, Jeju’s free diving sisterhood. Women on this island took up free diving in the 17th century to support their families, as their sailor husbands were constantly lost at sea. Their successors now don wetsuits and dive 65 feet into the ocean to fish for squid, octopus, seaweed, and abalone. They have had no formal training, having learnt this tradition from their mothers and grandmothers, and some can stay underwater for up to ten minutes at a time.