PADI Instructor Development Course in Utila, Honduras •

For the past year, my goal has been to become a PADI open water scuba instructor (OWSI). Two weeks ago, I completed the PADI Instructor Development Course (IDC) and Instructor Exam (IE) in Utila, Honduras, and now I’m finally an instructor! In this post, I’ll recap the IDC and IE.

How I Chose Utila

Dive centers around the world offer the PADI Instructor Development Course, so how did I end up on a tiny Honduran island?

Well, I knew I didn’t want to do it at home in Arizona, because I wanted to do it somewhere where I could also do a lot of nice diving after the course finished.

Also, even though I was the only student in my PADI Advanced Open Water, Rescue Diver, and Divemaster courses, I knew I wanted to take the IDC with a larger cohort. The individual attention is great for the other courses, but for the instructor course, I knew that being in a group and learning from my peers would be a big advantage.

Given that, I searched “biggest PADI IDC” in Google. The top dive center result for that search term turns out to be Utila Dive Center (UDC). I like to do my research, so I did look at a few other places as well, but there’s a reason UDC shows up first on Google: they’re really good at what they do, and what they do is train scuba instructors.

Most places only run the IDC a few times a year, and with only a handful of students each time. UDC runs it every single month, often booked full at 12 students (my May course was full, for example). So they have tons of experience training scuba instructors and preparing them to pass the instructor exam.

Utila Dive Center.

Getting to Utila

Getting to Utila from Tucson is not very straightforward. It required an evening flight from Tucson to Denver, a night at the Denver airport, a flight to Houston, a flight to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, a final flight on a tiny plane to La Ceiba, Honduras, a taxi to from the airport to the ferry terminal, and then a ferry to Utila. It didn’t help that I was recovering from a nasty bout of food poisoning and hadn’t eaten more than a couple bananas in several days when I started my journey.

Map showing my travel route from Tucson to Utila.

The smallest plane I’ve ever flown on at the San Pedro Sula airport.

I’m not sure why travel was such a pain on the way out; it was much easier getting home. Probably due to poor planning on my part, which wouldn’t be a surprise given that I don’t tend to plan details out more than a couple days before trips.

The IDC Schedule

Since I teach at a university, I had to squeeze the IDC in between the end of the spring semester and the start of my summer session courses. Even though I left the day after my last final, I still arrived in Utila 2 days after the IDC had officially started. This was okay, though, because I did part of it online through PADI e-learning. This made my IDC cost a little more, but it was worth it because it meant I was able to come prepared starting on the IDC’s third day.

You can see the schedule for the full IDC in the photos below. The time slots shaded pink are when we were in the water. About half of of these (skills and confined water) were in the pool rather than the ocean.

First 6 days of the Utila Dive Center PADI Instructor Development Course.

Second half of the IDC.

As you can see from the photos, it’s a pretty full schedule. This means that unlike the Divemaster course, you don’t actually do a ton of diving during the IDC. We practiced open water presentations in the ocean, but the only fun diving I did during the two weeks was a night dive on the 15th and a fun dive on the 21st, which was our day off before the 2-day Instructor Exam began. I’ve included underwater photos from both those dives at the end of this post. You can also see all my favorite underwater photos from the trip in this gallery.

Selfie on the Utila Dive Center dock.

The IDC Course

PADI probably describes it differently, but from my point of view as a student there were five aspects to the Instructor Development Course:

Important information we would be tested on
Important information we would not be tested on
Preparing and giving classroom presentations to students
Preparing and giving confined water (pool) presentations to students
Preparing and giving open water (ocean) presentations to students

There’s some nuance there that I’m not going to go into, and a couple other small things (for instance, performing a series of skills for a grade and practicing rescues), but that’s the gist of it. A big thing on the confined water and open water presentations is that we needed to have “students” (in this case, our peers) demonstrate the skills we were assigned, and catch and correct any errors. To me, this was the most important part of the course given its role in safety, and also the one I needed the most work on given that I’d never done it before.

Practicing confined water presentations at the Mango Inn pool.

We were also preparing for written exams, one on general standards and procedures for all PADI-related activities we can run as instructors, and a set of five smaller exams on dive theory. To ensure we’d be ready, we did several mock exams throughout the IDC.

The PADI Instructor Exam

In order to become a PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor, you have to take the Instructor Exam (IE). You can’t take the IE until you successfully complete the Instructor Development Course, so most people take an IDC then immediately take the IE.

After finishing the IDC on May 20, the 12 of us had a day off, then took the 2-day IE on the 22nd and 23rd. Five students from another center’s IDC joined us for the IE. The two examiners flew in from Tennessee and Colombia.

Some of my IDC classmates enjoying our day off.

The IE consists of the following:

Open water presentations
Rescue scenario
Written exams
Confined water presentations
Skill demonstrations
Knowledge development (classroom) presentations

By the time you complete the IDC, you’ve practiced all of these several times, so everyone went into the IE well-prepared.

The night before the IE begins, they tell you which skills and topics you’re going to be presenting. Afterward, we all went to dinner together to help each other out with the prep for our assigned skills/topics (an advantage of doing the IDC with a large group!). Everybody was nervous for the first day, not knowing how tough the examiners were going to be and worrying about the written exams.

It turned out that the examiners were more helpful than mean, and that everyone passed their written exams. After the first day was over, people were a lot more confident about passing! We breezed through the second day, and all seventeen of us passed and are now scuba instructors 🙂

Paradise.

Summary

The PADI IDC/IE experience was definitely one to remember, and a primary reason for that were the people involved. Our course director (Josiah “Juicy” Macklin) and staff instructors (Bryony Roberts and Marc Lapointe) knew exactly how to get us ready for the IE. My classmates each brought something to the table, and we were able to take advantages of each others’ expertise and knowledge to become better divers and (now) instructors. I am definitely happy with my decision to find a large group to take the IDC with – it was really helpful to have so many peers. And the fact that all 12 of us easily passed the IE speaks for itself.

At the same time, I’m glad to have the IDC and IE over with. It’s long and spent largely in a classroom, while paradise was right outside the door. After it ended, all I wanted to do was go diving!

So that’s exactly what I did. I spent one day diving in Utila, then went to the next island over, Roatan, for a few more days of fun diving. I’ll write about the fun dives in my next post, so keep an eye out for it!

Dives so far this trip: 6
Total dives: 111