This is part 2 of my little series of stor­ies that happened to me while work­ing as a dive instructor in South­east Asia. Again, all names have been changed, but the story is true! If you would like to know how to become a dive instructor, then please read my roadmap.

My First Three Courses

Finally, I was a dive instructor. It had cost me a lot of money and nerves. I had already been offered a job on Koh Samui, while still being busy study­ing for my Instructor Exam­in­a­tion on Koh Tao in Thai­l­and. I was full of ideals and I was gonna be the best instructor ever. I was well pre­pared. After all, I had only answered one ques­tion in the the­ory exams wrong and had got­ten full marks in all my prac­tical tests.

My First Course

The even­ing before my first day I dropped into the dive school to see what I was gonna do the next day. I was met there by Daniel, the man­ager. He told me my first course was gonna be a Medic First Aid Course. And if start­ing with an advanced course wasn’t enough, my stu­dent was a young Thai bloke who worked in one of the resorts affil­i­ated with my new employer. But I was assured, that his Eng­lish was sufficient

Medic First Aid is a one-day course that teaches CPR to the aspir­ing Res­cue Diver. This is being accom­plished through a series of gradu­ally more dif­fi­cult scen­arios. Not too dif­fi­cult to teach or to learn. If you have access to the Instructor Manual and if your stu­dent can under­stand what you’re try­ing to teach.

I arrived early at the dive shop to pick up the manual and read through it again. I was greeted by Daniel. He told me the manual was miss­ing and that Little Annie, the pup­pet you per­fom your excer­cises on had lost her head in an unfor­tu­nate acci­dent and had to be repaired. But none of it was a prob­lem. I should just watch the video with my stu­dent and prac­tice on a stuffed bag.

The course star­ted off well when I intro­duced myself and Wee, my stu­dent, didn’t under­stand a word I had just said. It didn’t get any bet­ter when we watched the video and I had to stop every 30 seconds to explain what we had just seen. But some­how we both man­aged. It prob­ably was a good thing that I didn’t have a clue what I had to teach and Wee didn’t under­stand a thing I said.

My Second Course

Late that day, just before the dive shop closed I arrived back, com­letely exhausted. With a cheery smile Daniel informed me that for the next three days I would be teach­ing Wee the Res­cue Course. What a fuckup!!

I stayed up half the night to pour over the res­cue manual. The next morn­ing I skipped the video com­pletely, figuer­ing that Wee didn’t under­stand it any­way and star­ted the classroom work. Of course he hadn’t done his home­work, cause he couldn’t under­stand the ques­tions. Instead he had prac­ticed his artistic skills and drawn some pretty dis­turb­ing images where the answers belonged. It was hell!

Later in the day we went to the beach to do some prac­tical exer­cises. Wee could barely swim and at the end of the day he had prob­ably swal­lowed 5–6 liters of sea­wa­ter and I was con­sid­er­ing sui­cide. We had also lost a mask and a snorkel, both of which would be deduc­ted from my salary. That even­ing I told Daniel that I couldn’t teach Wee any­more. He didn’t speak enough Eng­lish. Daniel looked thought­ful and then told me that their Thai dive instructor would have to teach that course then after all, even though she ‘really didn’t feel like it’.

My Third Course

My next course was once again Medic First Aid. Lan­guage wouldn’t be a prob­lem this time. Ralf was Ger­man and a really nice guy. And Daniel would do his best to bor­row a copy of the instructor manual from another shop.

The manual stayed miss­ing and we couldn’t bor­row another one, of course. But Ralf was a really nice guy. He was also a pro­fes­sional fire fighter and only had to do the course because he for­got his CPR cer­ti­fic­ate back home and couldn’t get hold of it. After I showed him the first exer­cise he grinned at me and told me that I had for­got­ten to pinch the nose while giv­ing res­cue breaths and, any­way, our meth­ods were really out­dated. We really should be pinch­ing the mouth and breath through the nose. He then showed me how to do CPR the proper way. I signed him off straight away. For the rest of the day we sat around the pool drink­ing beer, chat­ting about life. After that everything got easier…

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