Jim Perks – International Teachers get together to discuss course contents

The Course constructs change quite a lot since the demise of the diesel boats. When we still had diesel boats and run a diesel boat Perisher, we used to have students from all over the world. If you ran diesel boats, you could come on the British Perisher.

During that time and all the way through until I was Teacher and now, the Dutch kind of took that over because they still run diesel boats.

Their Perisher is exactly the same as ours. In fact, most are actually, so they’ve taken that mantle really, and the International Teachers get together quite regularly to discuss Course content and what’s changed and what’s new and any old thing.

Periscope Drills remain, the first thing that they all do. So, that’s what you do, you start with 1 ship, you very quickly get to 2 and 3 and then it gets more difficult, you go to 4 and 5 and then Teacher puts some funnies in, you know they do something unexpected or you’ve got to shoot at them, called Zero G Attacks which again is a lot of mental gymnastics to get a straight firing torpedo to hit the ship.

A Mark 8 torpedo so Belgrano was hit with a Mark 8 so you have to judge the speed of the ship to get the angle that you shoot at to make sure that the two converge and there’s a lot of mental gymnastics in that.

Again, it just adds pressure, and in the Trainer you fire helicopters at it so you can see them.