Fancy becoming a qualified ISA Surf Instructor? As the old adage goes, if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. And now that surfing has charmed it’s way into consuming your every waking thought, you’ve been dreaming up ways to make some money from this passion. I mean which surfer wouldn’t want to potentially travel the world to some of the most iconic surf destinations whilst making a buck?
Being a Surf Instructor has taken me to some incredible places, Like Mozambique
What does becoming qualified entail? Well, we’ll break it down for you here using our seemingly infinite source of Surf knowledge that comes in the form of Mr Chris Bond; ISA Level 2 qualified and South African national Surf Coach. As well as being our Head of Operations he is in this case, more importantly, an ISA Course Presenter.
Chris Bond in his natural habitat
ISA Surf Instructor Course Breakdown
The ISA Level 1 instructor course is an internationally recognised qualification. This will allow you to work as an Instructor anywhere around the world. There are two sections to this course. These two sections are separate from one another and stand as independent qualifications, however they are both required in order to become a practicing level 1 Instructor. The two sides are namely; the Surf Instructor award and the Surf Lifeguard award.
Surf Lifeguard Award
You will be responsible for the health and safety of clients during a Surf lesson. It is therefore imperative that you’re trained for any emergency scenarios that may occur due to the nature of the sport. This course is split up between class and beach work/assessments that entail.
- Standard First Aid training
- CPR
- Spinal Board Rescue
- Torpedo Buoy Rescue
- Rescue Board Rescue
- Swim Test (400m pool swim sub 9minutes)
An Independent instructor does all the training and assessments and will be responsible for grading you. The swimming assessment is often under-estimated. We therefore strongly suggest that you do sufficient training prior to your test. This qualification that is run on the South African Surf Adventure usually takes around 4 days to complete.
ISA Surf Instructor Certificate
An ISA course presenter (like Chris Bond) will present/lecture on the ISA training manuals. You will be assessed on both theoretical and practical scenarios based on the contents of the course work. Furthermore, you will undergo a practical surfing assessment. The course presenter will ask you to catch two left and two right open faced waves (green waves) within a limited time period. It usually takes around 3 days to complete this section.
Here Chris gives us a general overview of how we run these courses on our trips in South Africa
I hope this has been helpful?
If you require further information contact us and we’ll be glad to talk you through it.