The Diveshack Team

Rita is the owner of Diveshack, a PADI Five Star IDC Dive Centre in Sliema, Malta, also with a satellite office at the Comino Dive Centre on the island of Comino. She is a PADI Course Director and Trimix Instructor Trainer and has been involved in the dive industry since 1985.

Rita’s mission is to help as many people as possible experience the immense pleasure and adventure that scuba diving brings. She instils environmental awareness in her dedicated team and customers alike and this is paramount to safeguarding the fragile marine and terrestrial wellbeing of our seas and oceans.

Since becoming the first Maltese PADI Course Director in 1999 she has helped hundreds of people achieve their dream of becoming a PADI Instructor and live the PADI Pro lifestyle.

Always on hand to offer you a personal welcome and unrivalled service, call and speak to Rita today, tap in to her wealth of knowledge and discuss your dreams of becoming a PADI professional.

Head of Technical Training and Services, Director of Diving, Master Instructor and ERFiT here at Diveshack, Joolz is a former IT consultant who worked for many blue chip companies in the UK.

After having the opportunity (and money) to travel, dive, train and teach in many of the best diving locations in the world. He one day decided to give up corporate life to run away to join the diving circus!

Joolz has now been living and teaching in the Maltese islands for nearly 12 years and is one of the few (if not only) instructors to have worked full time on Gozo and Malta. This means he has extensive knowledge and experience of nearly every dive site in the Maltese islands. He has now over 10,000 dives under his belt and is happy diving to depths of 150m.

Joolz’s favourite training is Technical and was taught by several diving world record holders. With over 24 PADI specialities including Cavern, Joolz is sure he has a course for you to continue your diving education.

For the last 4 years Joolz has been a PADI ELITE instructor and last year was jointly awarded the PADI Continuing Education award.

With his down to earth Yorkshire training techniques and skills, Joolz will make sure you have the best training, knowledge, Maltese history lessons and FUN you can get. He was also famed in his last article by the Sport Diver magazine crew for “knowing all the best Maltese pie shops!”

Marcus joins us from Stuart Coves in the Bahamas where he was dive operations and water sports manager at the luxury Albany resort in Nassau.

Marcus is a PADI Master Instructor, an EFR Instructor Trainer and Shark Feeder Trainer. He has performed underwater modelling for The Times Magazine and was the principle underwater stunt man on movies such as "Isolation" (2015) and more recently "L'Odyssee", released 12 October 2016, where Marcus was the underwater stunt double for Lambert Wilson who plays Jacques Cousteau and also Pierre Niney who plays Philippe Cousteau. Marcus has also worked with Tom Cruise, Audrey Taotou and underwater specialist cameraman Peter Zuccarini.

Marcus's passion lies in teaching people to be confident, safe divers. Enjoying a challenge, he has worked with many 'wounded warrior' type projects in America, retraining wounded service personnel to become PADI Instructors on IDC Courses. Marcus also created the hugely successful "Internship Program" between Sea Experience Dive Centre, Florida and Stuart Cove's Dive Bahamas for newly qualified PADI Instructors.

We look forward to the positive impact Marcus will have on Diveshack and the dive industry in Malta.

Leo was born in Colombia in 1985 moved to Europe at a very early age. Brought up in Germany and Spain, he landed on Malta in 2007; since then he fell in love with the little Rock where his language skills developed even further. Although he had never dived before, Rita Vella and Diveshack adopted him and offered him his very first Job in the Diving Industry.

From his Open Water Certification, Rita encouraged him to move up the ladder and become an Open Water Scuba Instructor which he achieved by the end of 2007.

Up to today all his diving experience has been based in Malta, Gozo and Comino hence his love for these Islands.

In the interim he also had the opportunity to experience different industries, working at HSBC Malta & General Genetic Europe where his customer service management experience grew.

Working as Customer Service Manager and Open Water Scuba instructor at Diveshack he has had the freedom to combine all skills learned in the past years in the customer service field.

Leo teaches all levels of diving in various languages including English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and French.

Leo is very much a product of Diveshack and his enthusiasm for SCUBA diving is infectious.