In this episode of The Dive Locker Podcast you’ll hear from Mark Laboccetta about selecting equipment to become a freediving instructor.
Welcome To The Show!
Welcome to the dive locker podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest in diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management and dive business.
Hey again dive pro’s, its great to be with you today. Today we are going to cover part two of becoming a freediving instructor. Last week we went over part one of my transformation to becoming a freediving instructor by speaking with Kirk Krack founder of Performance Freediving International and now his Performance Freediving Academy. He went over the training side of this journey, now today we will hear from Mark Laboccetta the founder of Maverick America – a top freediving and spearfishing company. He’s who I reached out to to equip me properly.
But first a little fun. Another fun online activity that just came out is from the guys at The Great Dive Podcast, James and Brandon, they invented Pandemic Madness 2020. This is like March Madness with college basketball, except the teams that run through this tournament are legends in the diving industry. By voting each week it will eventually get whittled down to the top diver of all time. This is hilarious! You have got to see the matchups here, they have some of the biggest names in diving along with little ones like me, yep I’m in this.
And in the first round I’m up against Sir Robert Boyle – you know the guy that developed Boyle’s Law. Yeah, that’s a little hard to compete with. I need all the votes I can not to be eliminated by Sir Boyle. I’ll give you a compelling reason to vote for me instead of Boyle. I never made you do equations. Remember your Divemaster class P1V1=P2V2? Jeez, I twitch just thinking back to learning that. Don’t get me wrong, it’s useful and necessary. But I’m just not a fan of math. So check that out it’s the Great Dive Podcast’s Pandemic Madness 2020. Check out all the names and vote.
My Equipment Guy – Mark Laboccetta
Okay a little bit about our freediving equipment quest Mark Laboccetta. Mark started freediving and spearfishing in 1987 with his father Eddie in Sardinia where he was from. He started diving with a small Technisub 40cm pneumatic speargun for mullet along the Sardinian seashore with Eddie. Underwater hunting became his passion. The IUSA has awarded Mark 11 world spearfishing records to date.
By 1997 Mark and his father brokered a National Distribution contract for North America by Omersub of Italy. Mark’s family business was the steward and custodian of Omersub and Sporasub until the company was acquired by a public Corporation in 2013. After growing Technosport into a multi-million dollar revenue business Mark decided, he didn’t want to be an “operations function” for the man.
Spearfishing is a small grass roots industry with family owned artisans that produce the best products. These qualities made this fun in the first place. It was only natural to reinvent the mission of high-end small companies focused on artisanship rather than volume. And that is where Maverick-America was born.
Items In This Episode
- Freediving fins
- Freediving wetsuits
- Freediving masks and snorkels
- Freediving weight belts
Thanks For Listening!
That’s it for today, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher, that way you’ll be notified of new episodes as soon as they go live and please leave a rating. Items talked about in this episode can be found on the show notes Page at scubaguru.com and there you can also click the microphone and leave us a comment. Thanks again. We’ll see you in the next episode. Safe diving and take good care of my friends.
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