It was still dark outside when the sound of murmuring engines and fishermen testing marine radios awakened the small harbor of Daejin on South Korea’s east coast. Park Cheol-hoon and his father loaded their three-meter-long boat, the Cheongjinho, with nets and spears, then set out to catch seafood for their family restaurant. Their destination: waters perilously close to North Korea, the place they fled 18 years before.
Every day, dozens of South Korean ships set sail for the Jeodo fishing grounds despite the risks of being just one mile from the DPRK. Vessels are a broken radar or engine away from accidentally drifting across an invisible border into North Korean waters, and perhaps also into the hands of the regime.
This is not a mere hypothetical. North Korea has abducted thousands of ROK fishermen over the decades, and the ROK coast guard imposes strict safety measures in an effort to protect South Korean fishing boats, including conducting head counts at sea.
At times, fishermen have chafed at the red tape.
“Compared to ships at other ports, ships in Goseong County have to deal with complicated procedures,” Park told NK News.
But while the coast guard has recently simplified these procedures, border tensions have only increased since the collapse of a North-South military deal last year, raising the stakes for fishermen trying to make a living without becoming entangled in an inter-Korean clash.
Given the dangers of operating near the maritime border, South Korea’s coast guard wants to know exactly how many vessels go out to the Jeodo fishing grounds on a daily basis, and how many fishermen are aboard each ship.
Captains must register their crew members at a small office at the pier a day before embarking from Daejin Harbor.
“Name, age and ID, please,” a coast guard officer requested when NK News visited in early May. “Does your visa grant you the right to be out on the open sea?”
At 5 a.m., when the coast guard gives the OK, dozens of small white fishing boats, most carrying no more than a few crewmembers, speed out of the harbor toward the fishing grounds to the north, crashing over high waves as they move closer to the maritime border.
In the past, the vessels needed to pass a coast guard ship before entering the northernmost fishing grounds and hold up a sign with their boat’s name so officers could perform a head count, a kind of roll call on the open sea. The boats would bob over the waves as they waited in a line, the fishermen impatient to get the green light.
Only this year did the coast guard ease up the controls and start conducting the roll calls over marine radio to determine the number of crew members on each boat.
At the same time, the coast guard made clear that they are not taking any chances.
“[The Jeodo] fishing zone is located near the Northern Limit Line, so we are prepared for the possibility of North Korean patrol boats approaching,” a coast guard spokesperson told NK News.
“These particular fishing grounds are open for a limited period each year, and our coast guard vessel enters together with a navy ship when the fishing zone opens.” The coast guard also provides instructions to fishermen on how to remain safe from North Korean threats.
Most of North Korea’s abductions of fishermen have taken place off the east coast, including around Goseong County where Daejing Harbor is located.
While there have been no reported abductions of fishermen since the early 1990s, North Korea detained a South Korean fishing boat and its crew as recently as 2017 after the boat allegedly entered DPRK waters. North Korea released the crew a week later.
Not all have been so lucky. Of the 3,729 fishermen that the DPRK has abducted over the years, 457 are still being held in the North, according to South Korea’s unification ministry.
Despite the dangers, the men who fish daily at the Jeodo fishing grounds betray little fear of the North, even as DPRK boats sail close enough to be easily visible with a pair of binoculars.
For the Park family, other South Korean boats pose a bigger danger than North Korean ships.
The father and son practice a unique style of fishing that uses no large nets or rods or fishing line. Instead, they dive as deep as 30 meters to search for seafood while wearing an 88-pound (40-kg) scuba suit with a lead helmet that supplies oxygen via a long hose.
“I call it the lifeline,” Cheol-hoon told NK News.
The Cheongjinho arrived at the fishing spot at 5:45 a.m., and the father-son team worked together to attach all the metal parts of the diving suit with a power drill. On this day, his father would dive, though Cheol-hoon has also learned the trade.
His father, Park Myung-ho, stays submerged for 10-30 minutes at a time, surfacing with a net full of sea squirts, shellfish and the occasional octopus. After handing the net to his son, he dives back underwater.
While diving, Cheol-hoon organizes the catch while keeping a close eye on his dad. The two can’t communicate while Myung-ho is submerged, so he watches the oxygen bubbles rising to the surface to track where his father is.
His biggest concern is the oxygen hose. If it gets damaged or tangled, it could be lethal for the diver.
“So when we fish at the northernmost fishing grounds, I have to keep the lifeline connected safely to the diver. But many octopus fishing boats move at high speed, stirring up the water.
Cheol-hoon said these “allied” ROK ships make him more nervous than the “enemy” ones from the North.
Besides, he said, “North Korean boats are too slow. Their engines always break down.”
The Park family knows this reality well: They defected from the North by boat in 2006, though they did so on the west coast, where the seas are calmer.
Now, they live about as close to North Korea as you can get, less than four miles from the first military checkpoint restricting entry to the border area.
“We didn’t defect, we just moved house,” Myung-ho once joked on the popular South Korean television program “Now on My Way to Meet You.”
After multiple cycles of dives, the sun had risen high in the sky, the time reached noon, and the father-son team prepared to head back.
The day’s catch was a good one: They’d brought in about 330 pounds (150 kg) of meonggae, a red, tough-skinned sea squirt prized as a delicacy in Korea and Japan for its unique, briny flavor.
“Half we sell for 5,000 won per kilogram, the other half we use in our own restaurant,” Cheol-hoon said, unloading the nets.
Back at the restaurant that they operate with Cheol-hoon’s mother Kim Soon-hee, the family offers their catch both cooked — in a spicy seafood stew — and raw, served with a red pepper sauce and sesame oil. They buy fish from other fishermen, but everything else, including the seaweed, they catch themselves.
For now, business is good, and seafood at the Jeodo fishery is plentiful enough to supply them with what they need.
But it’s unclear whether that will remain the case as inter-Korean tensions rise and the maritime border becomes a potential flash point for conflict.
A North Korean warship recently sailed to the port closest to the South amid U.S.-ROK military drills on the east coast. DPRK leader Kim Jong Un has also rejected the Northern Limit Line that divides the two Koreas as “illicit and lawless,” vowing to redefine its borders after reframing the South as a “hostile” enemy country.
“If the Republic of Korea invades our ground territory, territorial air space, or territorial waters by even 0.001 mm, it will be considered a provocation of war.”
Yet none of this is on Cheol-hoon’s mind when he and his father venture out each morning. Rather than a dangerous place, the Jeodo fishing grounds are his livelihood — and even a sanctuary.
“Sometimes, when I’m diving, I just sit down on a rock for five minutes to look at how beautiful the sea is — the red meonggae on the black rocks,” he said. “The colors are incredible.”