Position

Teaching areas

Domestic and superyacht (which includes basic firefighting, advanced firefighting, sea survival, personal safety and social responsibilities, knots and lines, sail care, and crowd control).

Biography

Daniel has been with the Maritime School, based in Warkworth, for 8 years - 4 as a contract firefighting lecturer and 4 as a full-time lecturer.

Prior to this, he was an area manager looking after plumbing and electrical apprentices. He spent 11 years with the NZ fire service reaching the rank of station officer. He spent 5 years as a member of the NZ Fire Service Urban Search and Rescue team where he was deployed to Christchurch after the 2011 earthquake - spending over 2 weeks tasked with search and rescue and victim recovery. He resigned from the fire service in 2015.

His outside interests and hobbies are art where he found his creative streak late in life creating sculptures using different mediums from wood to glass and metal. He has sold the odd piece and has occasionally been asked to do commission work.

Why I love MIT

I love my job teaching something I’m passionate about. Students thoroughly enjoy the firefighting side of the course and I consider myself to be very fortunate to be able to do what I do.

If you ask the students I think they would say firefighting is very unique as not many people get the opportunity to actually fight live fires like we do, unless they are in the fire service or the Navy. Students who complete the course can travel the world while earning good money working on superyachts if they have the right attitude and skill set, work hard and stay motivated.

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