After a couple of days at Reef Photo & Video I got started on my PADI Instructor Development Course at Sea Experience in Fort Lauderdale. Bill Cole, the owner, was an instructor at Pro Dive until about nine years ago when he started up Sea Experience. For decades he’s been bringing divers to the best sites around Fort Lauderdale, which is famous for its shipwrecks. Luckily for me part of the IDC included open water dive training and we had the pleasure of joining Bill on some of his favorite sites.
Along with Bill’s deep experience (pun intended) comes a staff equally knowledgeable and experienced, and our IDC course director was Richard Hartley, nicknamed ‘The Commander’ for his years in the British military. The Commander is basically a scuba instructor trainer for every certifying agency, as well as a technical instructor trainer and a rebreather instructor trainer. Needless to say, he knew quite a bit about diving… Over the ten grueling, twelve to fourteen hour days, I definitely learned more than I needed to simply pass the PADI Instructor Examination, and come test day all three of our class passed with flying colors thanks to The Commander’s training.
Joining me in the course, in a very strange coincidence, were two officers on the NYPD Scuba Team. Paul and Brian, along with the other thirty members of the team, excel in zero-vis diving, and the 30-foot vis we had on several of our dives (pretty unimpressive in my book) was the furthest they’d ever seen underwater! Specializing in sea rescues around New York City and search and recovery dives, the underwater navigation and rescue techniques that we covered in the IDC were definitely a bit of a joke to these guys. Hearing about the adrenaline rush from jumping out of a helicopter in full scuba gear made me reconsider my career path, but a short description of the prerequisite strength & endurance test had me weighing the pros of video editing and analyzing research findings…
All-in-all it was a tough but rewarding ten days and now I’m proud to wear the PADI name on my sleeve as an open water scuba instructor! Hopefully I’ll be training caring and environmentally conscious divers to be future ambassadors of the oceans.
