Known for its space-age cities above ground, André Raine dives beneath the waves of South Korea to discover an ancient environment under threat from fishing practices.

“Whatever you do, when you get in, do not swim to the right,” muttered our rather taciturn German dive master. “You will be badly hurt.”

I looked down into the swirling, roiling mass of water in which he was gesturing. It looked more suited to a white water rafting expedition than a scuba diving session.

Far away on the other side of the tiny rocky bay, a Korean diver popped up. He scrambled up onto the rocks, took off his mask and gestured frantically to us. “No! Very dangerous! Don’t go in… is too dangerous!” he yelled. Our dive master regarded him briefly, turned to our group and said: “Suit up, we’re going in!” And so we did.

We were on Little Munsom Island, a small outcrop of rock jutting forth from the sea off the coast of Jeju Island, South Korea. Our small group had been ferried out to the islet via motor boat and dumped there. It was going to be either dive, or sit on the rocks for the rest of the day. I elected to dive, despite the dodgy conditions.

Stepping off the rocks and into the swirling froth, I paddled frantically out to the designated descent area. Some of the other divers were already there, whirling around in the currents. With all of us together, we deflated our BCDs and sank beneath the waves and into a green and murky underworld.

We followed the bay out and started down a vertical wall. Visibility, though pretty poor, soon revealed an incredible underwater landscape before us.

A mottled octopus crammed itself into a cave, while large clams gaped open to reveal their velvety insides

The wall descended to 40 metres, and sprouted the most bizarre soft corals – in the dim light, they were imbued with muted greens and purples, but with the dive torch on, they blazed with reds, oranges and yellows. Unlike the hard corals common in more tropical environs, soft corals do not produce solid calcium carbonate skeletons – rather they look like inflated sponges, each with little clusters of polyps arrayed along tentacle-like structures.

Some of them were huge, almost the size of me, each gently shifting in the currents. Interspersed among the coral, ghostly sea fans and bulbous sponges swayed, all providing home to an immense variety of life.

The waters around us teemed with countless damselfish, darting about and parting ranks as we swam through them. Small schools of brightly-coloured anthias, red soldierfish and fantastically neon and yellow angelfish regarded us with passing curiosity as we finned by.

Along the wall itself, sea anemones twitched their tentacles, some of them huge and sprawled languidly across the wall’s surface, others small and ghostly white as they clung to the dead form of Gorgonian corals.

Closer inspection of the multi-coloured wall revealed a seascape festooned with life. Bright orange starfish squatted among the corals, while tiny cracks and caves teemed with golden-tipped shrimp, which waggled their claws in annoyance.

Occasionally we would come across a nudibranch – brightly coloured sea slugs – some small, some large, all festooned in a riot of vibrant colours to ward off potential predators.

Running low on air, we ascended, and stared bleakly at our exit point. If anything, conditions had worsened, and the waves frothed and surged over the jagged, barnacle-studded rocks.

A group of South Korean divers had gathered on the cliffs above and were looking down on us with interest. Apparently we were the afternoon entertainment. I felt we provided some pretty good laughs (for them, not us) as we struggled to get out of the heaving waters.

Divers were dragged face first over the reef as they slipped and staggered in the waves. At one point, a wave took the dive master and the diver he was trying to heave out of the water back out to sea, bringing them perilously close to the washing machine conditions at the end of the bay. Eventually, bleeding and cursing, we were all back on dry land – and strangely eager to get back in again.

After a break for food and water we were back in the waves and swiftly descending into the quiet of the sea. Well, not exactly quiet – we soon heard the motorised whir of a nearby submarine. As well as being a world-class dive site, Little Munsom is also the site of South Korea’s only tourist submarine.

If you don’t want to defy death by donning scuba gear, sitting on cushions and descending in the dry environs of the trusty Jiah is a viable option. Indeed, the day before, I had taken my four-year -old aboard the Jiah for a quick trip beneath the waves, much to his excitement. We sat in relative comfort as the sub trundled past a shipwreck and downward alongside the sea wall, while outside, divers fed fish by the sub’s small portals and the lights illuminated the soft corals – to collective gasps of delight from the assembled Korean and Chinese tourists.

While nothing like a diving experience, this was a great option for my son, who is not yet versed in the intricacies of drift dives, underwater currents, buoyancy control devices and safety stops.

As the sub whirred in the gloomy distance, we continued our dive in the opposite direction. A small school of squid jetted past us, no doubt frantically peering behind them in fear of the apparently never-ending fleets of Korean squid-fishing vessels that relentlessly pursue them. Coral- and sponge-covered rocks revealed themselves to be camouflaged scorpionfish, which flared their poisonous dorsal fines and tracked our progress warily.

A mottled octopus crammed itself into a cave, while large clams gaped open to reveal their velvety insides. Towards the end of the dive we came across a writhing mass of striped catfish which seethed about like a living mass of sea grass.

All too soon, we were back on the surface, bleeding and cursing yet again as we exited the water. It had been an incredible experience.

Eventually our water taxi reappeared and we lugged our gear onto its deck and began the journey home.

As we entered the harbour, we passed the gigantic fleet off the town of Seogwipo. Each boat was equipped with a string of gigantic globular lights. We were to see these same vessels when we left Jeju two days later.

As our plane flew upwards into the night, the fleet stretched across the black waters below us from the coast into the distance – each one lighting up a patch of night sea with incandescent light. The light attracts deep-sea squid and fish up to the surface, making them easy to haul aboard to feed the hungry masses.

As we stared down at this glittering human constellation of thousands of fishing vessels, I wondered how there could be any fish or squid left out there in the seas off Jeju. Perhaps in the future, there won’t be.

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