To get up to speed, there are a couple of preparation events that are well worth attending, to give you plenty of practice without the pressure of the exam. The first gives you a chance to practise planning a rescue workshop, run a teaching dive, do a branch interview and a practical surface lesson at short notice. All under the guidance of experienced NI Coaches, whose job it is to nudge you in the right direction.
The second prep event was almost a fake exam. The first day was run from a skippered hard boat developing First Class candidates; the second run from RIBs, developing Advanced Instructor candidates. Like the exam, it’ s an intense couple of days where you are expected to teach( and teach how to teach) absolutely everything from making up a shot, driving boats, locating dive sites, weather, buoyage, planning, dive management … the list is endless! The nice thing about these prep events is you can work out what you then need to do for the exam, so when it comes to the actual day, you are about as well prepared as you can be.
Making the‘ lazy prussic’
One of the best things about the 2025 event were the five candidates. We vaguely knew each other from being active on the ITS circuit, but apart from the odd IFC we hadn’ t really worked together. It didn’ t take long for us to form a brilliant little group, bouncing ideas off each other, offering loads of support and bringing the whole group along for the ride. One of the assessment areas is Attitude, and the five of us worked so well together we didn’ t have a moment where we fell out. The examiners commented that it was one of the best groups they had seen working together.
Overcome and adapt
So what about the exam itself? The candidates rocked up to Bovisand Lodge Holiday Park on a sunny Thursday lunchtime, and all appeared to have brought every buoy, piece of rope and shot weight from home. We tipped it all out and sorted it out into a vague logical order, practising making up a lazy shot for the First Class Diver adventurous dive, and the grid task for the AI dive. We even brought whiteboards, magnetic labels, a billion pens, a laminator and printer!
Prepping the lazy shot
At 6pm the exam started proper at the Mountbatten Centre. We had to plan two dives for the next day. The first was an adventurous dive where we were to simulate the techniques for a deeper dive; the second a project dive to conduct a wreck survey of the stern of the James Egan Layne. To complicate this, in the 90 minutes we also had to teach how we were doing these tasks to the examiners.
On the Friday, we headed down to Mountbatten to unload kit and lay it out ready for a dry run. At 8am we gave the day brief, then ran through( and taught) making up a lazy shot, deploying a drop tank, diver tags and strobes, then another dry run of the techniques we were to use for the second dive. Then we bundled it all up into builders’ rubble tubs and taught loading our gear onto Red Alert, to a boat seating plan we had worked out.
On the way out to the Rosehill, each candidate had to‘ ping’ a wreck to demonstrate they could position-fix. I had the Elk to ping, so showed a couple of different techniques to the examiner. I took advantage of modern bathymetric seabed data to accurately position the boat
The dry run The briefing takes place
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