After the IE: That’s It?

From left, then OWSI and now PADI Course Director Tom West, Freddie Smith, Max Jaskw, Jules Norfolk and Todd Hutchins (Click to enlarge.)

Anticlimactic.

That’s how it felt, Mo said, now that the IE was over and he was a certified Open Water Scuba Instructor. There was so much buildup, so much tension. Three days of Prep Course, 10 days of Instructor Development Course, the IE’s 4 academic exams then back the next morning, still tired and stressed out, for the pool and classroom tests.

Having passed those, the open water session turned out to be uneventful. 5′s and high 4′s all around. By 2 p.m. it was done and by 7 it was back to Charlie’s, on the corner of Soi 6 just down from the shop, with the Heineken, the sunset, the usual crowd and a feeling like, “wow, shouldn’t this feel, well, not so normal?”

Anthony Carnell, the first Aquanauts Diving Instructor Training website intern, who’s back in Pattaya for his MSDT and now freelancing, agreed with Mo. It does feel anticlimactic.

Anticlimactic, but damn good!

It was a long road for Mo, who works doing private security in Iraq and did his internship in 1-month blocks, taking two months off in-between each one. He could have gone to the IE in December and probably passed. But he wasn’t sure and he wasn’t in that much of a rush, so he put it back.

That’s the beauty of our Personalized Training System. You work individually with Master Instructors and Course Directors every day. We only have about 20 people max at any one time. And we’re got two in-house course directors. That has led to some incredibly impressive scores on the IE and equally impressive instructors.

With the IE done, that left only the party. Interns organize their own post-IE Party. Often it’s a classy dinner at a premium Pattaya restaurant. This time was a lower-key, casual affair that started with a barbecue at Lek’s, the restaurant on the grounds of our intern accommodations. The group then ventured out around town, using the evening to both celebrate the new instructors, but also “initiate” Chad Peacock, a new Canadian intern who arrived earlier in this week.

Chad is actually the brother of Nathan “Mr. 5.0″ Peacock, who did his internship with us and graduated with honors in March 2006. See his IDC/IE photo essay here. I’m sure you’ll read more about Chad here later, but let’s just say Nathan may have briefed him on Pattaya, but he’s discovering seeing is truly believing.

So what next? Well, let’s put it this way, this post was almost titled: Warning: IDC Whiplash Ahead. In fact, the next prep course is just a few days away, so the cycle is about to start over again. The exams aren’t usually so close together, but this is just the way the PADI schedule worked out. So, among the instructors, it’s “take a deep breath and let’s do it again!”