The 1st Post…. About Aquanauts Diving Instructor Training Internships

Hello and welcome to the Thailand Diving Life Chronicles, the first-ever “blog” from us here at Aquanauts Dive Centre in sunny Pattaya Beach, Thailand.

It’s an appropriate day for us to start a blog about diving — and particularly learning to become a dive instructor — in Thailand. Today marks the start of the (almost) monthly PADI Instructor Exam here in Pattaya. As few as 5-6 years ago, PADI held just a few IE’s a year here. Now Pattaya has become one of the most-prolific instructor-training areas in all of Southeast Asia. In February, Pattaya has 29 candidates on the IE, more than backpacker heaven and traditional big-numbers Koh Tao.

Why the transformation? Simple: Pattaya is the number one city in the world for what is known as the Diving Instructor Training Internship. Students come from all over the world and spend as many as 6 months here learning to become a scuba instructor. About a quarter of our interns are not even certified divers when they arrive here. I admire the guts of a “non-diver” to plunk down the funds for a 6-month training regimen, possibly never having even strapped on a BCD and regulator before.

Of course, we get students from all levels, all the way up to Divemaster and Assistant Instructor. They need much less time, but get the full internship experience as well.

There are internship programs offered around the world, some of which have been around for quite a bit longer than ours. But whether you develop Web browsers (remember Netscape?) or scuba internships, being first in the market isn’t that important. It’s the quality that matters.

We here at Aquanauts looked at the internship market and asked ourselves, “how can we make it better?” Our answer was our Personalized Training System. We decided to keep things small, focus on individual instruction and produced the best quality instructors we could.

We also wanted to make our program truly all-inclusive. There are no hidden costs or things you need to buy later.

Aquanauts still is the only internship program that offers not one, but two, totally exhaustive equipment packages that include everything down to the CPR/Rescue Pocket Masks. Our Mares & Scubapro packages are “pure” in that we include everything we can from the manufacturer, including the mask, snorkel, gloves and boots.

So, what does all of this have to do with this auspicious day. Well, Aquanauts sent three people to today’s instructor exam. These three worked with two in-house course directors, a master instructor and an IDC staff instructor. Four instructors, 3 students.

Our guys — Mo Morrison, Cory Cannon and Jon Rhind — as I write this (8:30 p.m.), have just finished their 3 hours of written exams. It’s the first leg of a grueling 3-day ordeal. They’re back in the pool tomorrow morning, being tested on confined water skills, then back at 11:30 a.m. for classroom presentations. On Sunday, they march off to the pier for Rescue and Open Water skills in the sea.

If they are like the previous classes of Aquanauts interns, they all will be celebrating a new instructor certification all night Sunday and into early Monday.

Now, as with the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future results. But, having said that, our interns have compiled an impressive track record of not just passing the IE, but scoring at the top of each class.

Each IE candidate will be faced with 12 tests. Written tests are scored in percentages while water-based work is graded on a scale of 1-5, 5 being best. So what do Aquanauts interns score? Let’s just put it this way: We’re getting used to lots of 5.0s.

On the February 2007 IE, we sent five candidates who had a possible 60 scores over 3 days. They scored fifty — 5 0 — perfect scores of 100% or 5.0.

THAT is Personalized Training in action.

Read on to see how our March trio fares.