There are many reasons to learn how to scuba dive. For many it is the love of the ocean, for others it opens doors to new adventures. Scuba diving will provide endless opportunities to explore an undersea world that few see firsthand, and local residents now have a convenient way to learn through Trilogy Dive Center.
“Scuba is something that I always wanted to do since high school,” said Mike Massaro. “After graduating high school, I was focused on becoming a diver and scuba instructor. I enrolled in an EMT course at HCC to give me a medical background and found that I really liked EMS. After working a year or so as an EMT, I joined the military and put scuba on hold. I finally found time to get back into scuba and became a scuba instructor.”
Massaro also had great opportunities as the diving safety officer at Clearwater Marine Aquarium, working with Florida International University to teach scientific diving and supporting Aquarius, the only undersea research facility in the world, which is used by the U.S. Navy and NASA’s NEEMO program.
Massaro is the owner of the recently opened Trilogy Dive Center in Tampa and loves that he gets to teach others the importance of scuba safety both locally and internationally.
“Trilogy has been training fire, law enforcement and EMS personnel for more than 10 years,” Massaro said. “Along with public safety diving, we taught tactical medicine, advanced life support courses and later started teaching diving medicine.”
Last year, Massaro decided to open his retail scuba store and focus more on recreational and technical scuba diving.
“We have trained over 200 divers in the past four months and have grown our staff of instructors to a total of six,” he said. “Five of the six are military veterans and the sixth is a military spouse.”
If you ask Massaro what makes Trilogy Dive different from other dive shops in the area, he’ll tell you it’s his staff.
“Our instructors have backgrounds in military diving, special operations, emergency medicine and hyperbaric medicine,” he said. “They were military divers, commercial divers, military medics, and all have unique skill sets. There isn’t anything our team is not able to teach. Our dive medicine instructors have real, hands-on patient care experience. We didn’t just learn medicine in a book and pump on a CPR dummy.”
To learn more about Trilogy Dive, visit www.trilogyscuba.com or call Massaro at 425-3500. The shop is located at 4501 E. Columbus Dr. in Tampa.
