All together, my PADI divemaster training took just over six weeks. This is usually the recommended minimum amount of time, but if you haven’t got any pressing tasks to get on with in life, you should really consider spending longer on it. Extra time at most dive centres does not mean extra cost, so why not gain more experience and get in as much diving as you can – especially if you’re with a fantastic school like Blue Marlin in an incredible location like Komodo.
When you come to the end of your course, the last few tasks are usually the most challenging. In addition to rounding off a few skills like search and recovery and putting together an emergency assistance plan, the final two challenges for me were also the ones I’d been dreading the most – the ‘stress test’ (also known as equipment exchange) and the ‘snorkel test’ – also known as a heavy night of drinking and probably the best send off you’ll ever have in your life.
SEARCH AND RECOVERY
Search and recovery is a really useful skill to learn. While you’ll have touched on aspects of it during your Advanced and Rescue courses (i.e., reciprocal compass headings and search patterns), this specialty skill incorporates lifting procedures.
As part of the process of recovering items from the ocean, you also need to learn how to tie a variety of knots, including the bowline, sheet bend and two half hitches. Your instructor will probably have you demonstrate U-shape and expanding square search patterns, with recovery of smallish items like partially buried weights or weight belts. You will need to show that you can tie each of the knots while hovering underwater, and you will have to put one of them to the test by attaching an item to a lift bag, adding air, ascending with it in a controlled manner, and safely transporting it back to the boat.
None of the tasks is particularly challenging, but it will be easier if you practise the knots a few times on the surface first.
EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE PLAN
The emergency assistance plan is pretty straightforward, but this doesn’t mean you should underestimate how long it might take to put together. It’s basically a list of contacts and specified actions that people may need in the case of an accident or emergency while on board your dive school’s boat.
As a PADI divemaster trainee, you’ll be asked to prepare one for a specific boat at a specific dive site, which means you need to think about the resources available on that boat, as well as which scenarios would be most likely to occur. For example, if you list potential injuries caused by marine life, it would be inappropriate to include an animal that doesn’t inhabit that particular location.
When you’re putting together your contacts list, you should include phone numbers for people at your dive centre, emergency contacts at DAN, search and rescue teams, air and land transport services, and radio channels the boat could use. You should add the address of the nearest hospital, as well as the nearest facility with a recompression chamber. You should also write a step-by-step guide to how to deal with common problems like missing or unresponsive divers, and include information on how to recognise and respond to various injuries. As an example, you can find mine here.
STRESS TEST/EQUIPMENT EXCHANGE
The PADI divemaster stress test is designed to evaluate your ability to cope with potentially stressful and unfamiliar scenarios under the water. It takes place in a safe, controlled environment like a shallow pool, and involves exchanging all equipment except your wetsuit while sharing a single regulator. If you appear to be comfortable with this, your instructor might throw in a few curve balls, like blasting air in your face, turning off the tank, inflating your BCD or snatching equipment from you. These are not PADI requirements, so if you have any concerns about the way your equipment exchange might be conducted, speak to your instructor beforehand.
Before taking on this ordeal, it’s not a bad idea to look for tips online. Watching YouTube videos with your buddy can help give you ideas for a routine. You can also discuss with them which order you’d prefer to do things in. For example, if you struggle with mask removal, you might like to get it out of the way first so it’s not playing on your mind. One very handy tip is to start with your buddy’s gear and exchange back to your own. This means that you will feel increasingly more comfortable as the exercise progresses, rather than adding to the anxiety by taking on more and more unfamiliar equipment. It’s also a lot easier to remove someone else’s gear than it is to put it on.
Last but not least, pick a buddy who’s confident underwater and can cope without air for longer than average! It might just make the difference between a pass and a fail. Your score out of 5 is more subjective than in the other water skills tests, and depends largely on how controlled the process is.
SNORKEL TEST
The snorkel test is your unofficial final exam and is basically an all-encompassing term to describe the night when you celebrate passing all of the official PADI requirements.
Depending on your dive centre, it could incorporate any number of publicly humiliating tasks, but one in particular remains a constant – downing some very potent alcohol through a snorkel that has a sawn-off water bottle attached to the top. It doesn’t sound like the worst challenge, except that you have to wear a mask at the same time. Your inability to breathe makes you much more anxious to finish your cocktail, and by the end of it, you probably won’t feel too jolly. Embarrassing stories may also be thrown into the mix for good measure.
Eat a lot beforehand to line your stomach, drink water afterwards, and try to pull through the drunken stupor, because you don’t want to miss your big night. If, like me, you can surprise everyone by pulling some live band karaoke out of the bag (fortunately, there’s no record of this!), then everyone’s a winner…
My PADI divemaster training is being conducted by Blue Marlin Komodo, which is located in the small town of Labuan Bajo on the island of Flores. While PADI lays out a list of requirements for passing the course, each dive centre conducts it slightly differently. The order in which you complete each requirement varies, as does the timescale. Blue Marlin Komodo recommend that you take 8 to 10 weeks to fully experience and familiarise yourself with each dive site. They include time on a liveaboard and provide quality training with a focus on enjoyment and safety. For further information about the course, see their PADI divemaster training brochure.
Kudos to you for doing this – the ‘stress test’ sounds like my worst nightmare. I did my PADI about 8 years ago and whilst I struggled with clearing my mask in the pool – at the bottom of the ocean I panicked. The feeling of water around my nose made me hold my breath and my instructor had to pinch my nose so that I could breathe again through the regulator. As much as I tried, I couldn’t clear my mask properly as I was in panic mode – I couldn’t wait to get back on the boat. After a pep talk by my instructor on the boat, I managed to clear my mask second time around, and although I have been diving 3 times since passing my PADI, I really don’t feel comfortable whilst under water.
I feel as though its a real shame but I am really struggling to get over this ‘fear’.
I am exactly the same as you! Rest assured you are not alone. It’s a common issue. The best way to get ‘over’ it is to just practise. I spent a session in a swimming pool just sitting with my mask off on the bottom. I still hate the skill, but I’m a little more confident about it than I used to be. I think it’s some kind of psychological thing, like a fear of spiders. We can’t explain why we react that way, but it happens, and it isn’t pleasant! Fortunately, it’s incredibly rare that you would lose your mask on a dive, and not that common for it to flood. Remember not to pull the straps too tightly, as this can actually cause more water to come in :)
congratulations on finishing your training!! I’ve really enjoyed reading about your course every week!! greetings from Australia :-)
Thanks Jonny! Ahhhh, I miss Australia! I’m a bit jealous now…I fly home to the UK on Thursday!
Congratulations and my hats off to you for doing this! I don’t think I can ever pass this test –i may not be able to handle the stress nor take those “curveballs” underwater. Open water is more than ok for me! LOL
Haha. It’s really not that stressful if you take it a step at a time. One of my main reasons for doing it was to become more confident as a recreational diver. There were definitely a few moments that made me nervous, but for the most part it was an incredible experience :)
I used to dive a lot in my youth, and qualified using BSAC rather than PADI. The “stress test” you describe sounds very similar to the “ditch and don” required for BSAC 3rd class, where you had to take all your equipment off except mask, snorkel & fins, surface, then dive down and put all your equipment on again at the bottom of the pool. At the time I thought it was something that I’d never have to use, then several years later when diving a wreck I got badly snagged in fishing line. Being able to take off my tank to free my first stage from the line, then put it back on again turned out to be very handy.
Wow. That must have been quite scary! I would not like to get tangled in anything while diving. It’s something you hear about, but I’ve never been near that kind of environment. I guess these exercises seem silly at the time, but they’re great at preparing you to deal with unfamiliar and stressful situations. I know someone who did a negative back-roll entry in a huge drift but had forgotten to turn his air on! He had to take his tank off as he descended! I hope that never happens to me!
As someone who’s been an avid diver for 10 years but will (likely) never get a divemaster, I LOVE reading what all this training entails. So intense! Particularly the snorkel test ;-)
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Haha. The snorkel test was hilarious – from what I remember. I had to do it just after the stress test, so it was a pretty nerve-wracking final day!
Wow… congrats on passing all that stuff, especially the stress test. From what official PADI sources say, it is clear that any “extra’s” during the “stress test” are not required. The equipment exchange test is what it is: changing equipment. Nothing less, but also nothing more, espcially not sadistic stuff like turning off air, throwing sand in the face, etc. That’s NOT the official PADI test and it would only be fair to adjust your blog post to make that clear. I have seen examples of this “test with extra’s” that were VERY irresponsible on the instructors” side and I would not waste a second of reporting the instructors to PADI if they would do this to me.
I absolutely fail to see how anyone doing this test can ever think it’s fun.
The same goes for the snorkel test, but this has absolutely nothing to do with learning to dive or even learning anything in life in general, so I won’t spoil the fun (really?) you had by willingly taking part in it. I guess it is clear that I would never do that snorkel test. Still, I can imagine there is a big social pressure and I can see how people who have real problems with it are somehow not as accepted in the community as those who do. :-)
Hi Jo. Thanks so much for your comment. It’s my understanding that the stress test is designed to see that you can deal with a stressful and unfamiliar environment. For me, it was stressful enough doing the basics of what PADI requires and my instructor didn’t do any of those additional things. From talking to other divers, though, it does sound like it’s quite common for instructors to add stressors if they feel that their students are particularly comfortable with the minimum PADI requirements. As long as this is done in a safe environment and the student does not fail because a test is particularly hard, I personally don’t see any harm in it.
As for the snorkel test, if I’d asked to avoid it, my dive school would not have pushed me into it and I would still have passed the course. It’s become quite a legendary right of passage and I think many students welcome the chance to celebrate their achievements with all their closest friends. There’s no reason why this should include copious amounts of alcohol or public embarrassment and I would like to think that in most professional dive schools there would be no pressure to take part. I see it as similar to the ‘requirement’ to do your 100th dive naked. This was not enforced for me and I chose not to do it. While there had been a lot of jokes leading up to the event, noone batted an eyelid when I opted out. In my experience, most dive schools and instructors are respectful of people’s limits and very professional when it comes to their training. However, if I suspected that an instructor was putting undue stress on a student or taking unnecessary risks I too would report them.