From Friday, October 17 to Wednesday, October 22, the practical part of the VIT diving instructor evalutation took place at Murner See. Tobias Hummel (TL* candidate), Michael Beer (TL** candidate), David Schacknies, and Christian Jobst (TL*** candidates) participated as diving instructor candidates. The examination was supervised and evaluated by VIT course directors Udo Schacknies, Florian Dams, and Rudi Biedermann. The hub of the operation was the Freitagstaucher diving center in Rappenbügl near Teublitz, where the equipment was prepared, the tanks were filled, the follow-up work was done, and the training room was used.
The actual exam dives were conducted at Murner See in Wackersdorf, including at the Rutsche and Plattformen dive sites. After arriving and preparing together on Friday afternoon, the participants began with a check dive before gradually completing the practical training, organizational, and rescue tasks over the following days.
The focus was on open water diver training with briefing, demonstration, and instruction, orientation and navigation, hydrology, buoyancy control, and the complete rescue chain, including recovering an injured diver and subsequent CPR on land. The candidates were assessed in changing functional roles as instructors, divers, and safety divers. To deepen their theoretical knowledge, the candidates gave short presentations on relevant topics between dives. In addition, part of the apnea exam was conducted on Monday in the newly built Ostbad in Regensburg. The second part was then moved to Murner See and ended with a night dive.
The combination of different candidate levels (1-, 2-, and 3-star) within the exam proved to be a practical arrangement, as it enabled realistic training situations and a broad spectrum of observation and assessment for examiners and candidates.
All candidates successfully passed the practical exam. Special thanks go to the four volunteers Melissa, Sebastian, Sebi, and Sven for their participation and support, which cannot be taken for granted in this context. We would also like to thank the examiners present and the VIT for conducting and fairly assessing this instructor evaluation.
