Jim Perks – The pressures of being Teacher

Simon: What are the pressures that people don’t know about being Teacher?

I think it’s the understanding that again … there have been more than one incident during Perisher running from the loss of Antares to hitting the Isle of Skye pretty hard. There is stuff that happens and we have to put as many safeguards in place to ensure that doesn’t happen so we have navigation safety cells so a completely different cell which does just Navigation away from the students, for the Captain to make sure the Captain is content that he’s safe.

You now have additional people that go to sea with Teacher to help him do the same thing. You know, the Captain is always in command. Teacher can take conduct so he can effectively becomes the Captain but ultimately he’s never the Captain so the Captain has to understand that if he’s not happy, he needs to jump in.

Simon: This is the Captain whose boat you’re on?

So, that’s a very important thing to get right and something I took a lot of time with the Captains that I was using their boats of to make sure they understood that and the way that we ran it when I was Teacher is that I took conduct for the whole month. It was just easier for me.

For me it was easy. You’re the Captain, if you’re not happy, you need to tell me because if you say nothing, I’ve conduct, I can do whatever I want with your submarine, but let’s not forget ultimately in a Court Marshal, it’s your submarine, and you will be in as much trouble as me.

So, that’s developed, that’s changed. There are now much more stringent rules as to who has conduct when and we just did what we thought was best for us. So, there’s that, things can go wrong, so you’ve got to be confident in your own ability.

We’re trying to push the students as far as we can, but as Teacher you’ve got to be comfortable that you can go a little bit further than them because you need them to cross that line whilst ensuring that submarine and all those people remain safe.