BSAC

Richard Aldridge
Trident SAC

The PIE is not something you can eat, but its certainly something that you can get your teeth into.
In order to qualify as a BSAC open water practical instructor, you need to attend three separate events, the last of which is the PIE.

Having attended the IFC ( instructor foundation course ) in 2002 where you are taught over an intensive weekend how to teach others, and then the practical instructors course in 2004, where you are taught how to teach in open water, it was time to take the plunge (literally) and do the PIE.
I managed to get onto the November exam because someone else dropped out, so I only had a week or so to get my act together for it. During the previous practical instructors course, we were shown how to prepare lesson plans, and how to actually turn these into an open water lesson.
On the PIE we were supposed to have already written out lesson plans for about 8 open water lessons for such things as AS, RB and tow, CBL, SMB & DSMB, etc. We could be asked to do an open water lesson on any one of these on the day. As the BSAC courses always say, preparation is the major part of the exercise. If you prepare in advance, the lesson itself should go smoothly.
I therefore took my lesson plan sheets and parts of my instructor manual away on holiday with me, much to my wife's dismay. I managed to get most of them written out while sitting in a large shopping center in Portugal, while waiting for my wife to look round the shops. ( a win - win situation I think!)
I must admit to being more than slightly apprehensive about the exam, as I knew my 'students' were themselves aspiring instructors, perfectly capable of performing any of the lessons themselves. While we were performing our lesson we would be observed at all times by a senior instructor who would take notes throughout.

I drove up to Stoney to arrive at 0830 on what turned out to be a lovely sunny day. I was ushered past other divers waiting to get in, so I parked as near to the water as you can get. Its not often you can do that! Once all the examiners and students had all arrived we were given a short brief on what the day had in store for us. We would all be split up into groups of 3, with our examiner for the morning. We were then given an in water lesson which we had to teach to the other 2' students'. We had a few minutes to prepare for this, so all my work on holiday was justified after all.

My lesson was to teach a controlled buoyant lift, which I did after the other 'students' had performed their RB and tow and AS demonstrations.
I think all of us were quite nervous about what we had to do. It was easy to tell from the speech and body language that the 'instructor' was not entirely at ease. Our national senior instructor was very good and kept well out of the way, so as not to intimidate us. We were all too aware however that he was listening and making notes on everything we said and did.

The examiner is looking to ensure that all the essential elements of the lesson are in place, these being: a safe and effective delivery of information that is progressive in its build up and includes all the elements of SEEDS.
The other two 'students' in my group did good demonstrations of their lesson albeit with a few mistakes. My mask strap decided that this was a good time to break, so there was a slight delay between the first and second demonstration while I replaced it.
All too soon it was my turn. I had 45 minutes to demonstrate CBL, which included kitting up, briefing, the actual lesson itself and a de-brief. We were explicitly told to keep the brief, brief and to try to keep to the 45 minute time slot.

Once I started my initial introduction, I forgot my nerves to an extent, and concentrated on the lesson in hand.
I briefed my 'students' on what we were going to do, and why we need to learn the skill. We then spent quite a long time performing a dry run of the CBL broken down into its constituent parts. This included the correct grip on the casualty, position of the hand on the inflate / deflate controls, position of the casualty's arm with respect to where their dry suit dump valve was located. My students both had them in different places just to make things more interesting.
We then all performed a buddy check prior to doing a stride entry into the water. We used an SMB to hold onto on our surface swim out to a flat bottom at about 6M depth. I used the reel attached to the SMB to let down a weight in order to create a datum line as a reference point, something else we learnt on the practical course.

Once on the bottom we went through the exercise again, step by step with each student gradually building up the parts of the exercise until they were both doing small lifts from the bottom on each other. Of course they performed the exercise easily as they have both had to teach it themselves so it wasn't entirely realistic. During the exercise, I had no idea where our examiner was as I was too involved in what I was trying to do.
After completing the mini lift, I then moved our datum line to shallower water in order that we could do a complete lift to the surface. In hindsight this was a mistake.
As this was supposed to be a first CBL in open water, perhaps I should not have done a complete lift to the surface in the first place. The first lift went fine, but my datum line had become slack and drifted away from where it should be. The line became tangled on another divers cylinder and I had to go and free it, leaving my students unsupervised on the surface.
We then repeated the lift with the other student, having re-tightened the datum line. After this we swam to shore and performed a quick de-brief, and explained what we would do in next weeks 'lesson'. As it happened I was just about on time for the 45 minutes we were given.

We then changed out of our dive gear to have a quick cup of tea and something to eat before a final de-brief by the national coach. We were told that it would be a couple of weeks before we heard the outcome of the exam from BSAC, and that the comments that accompany the outcome are just as important as the result itself.
We were all finished by midday to my surprise. For some reason I thought I would be at Stoney for the best part of the day.

The next thing to do is the TIE exam (theory paper) in order to fully qualify as an open water instructor. I hope to be able to do this sometime next year.
Richard Aldridge

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