Hello everyone,

My name is Stefano Sibona and in my everyday life I am a financial advisor.
But, in this blog, I want to tell you a different story. The story of a fifty year-old guy from Turin who fell in love with the sea during his childhood.

I was a very lucky kid since I had the privilege of spending the holidays with my grandparents, at the beach, every year. During that period, at the beginning of the 70s, even the sand of West Liguria had little secrets which made my tiny eyes, covered with a mask, shine. Somewhere, at my parents’ house there is still a glass jar containing my first artefacts. I am sure that, if I started rummaging in their cellar, I would also find my first rudimentary speargun. But the memory of that time that I cherish most jealously is the flavour of the octopus salad that my grandmother promptly prepared for lunch as soon as I was back from the beach with my fishing spoils.

When I was thirty years old, after the sea had become more of a nighttime entertainment than a daytime one, I was struck by the diving activity.
I approached this world thanks to the suggestion of a friend who had been attending the Circolo Underwater Valmessa Sub in Villardora, a pleasant town in the west of Turin, for quite some time. I was able to collect all the necessary certifications to become first a diving guide and then an instructor in three years.

Once I got tired of being part of the environment of the city diving club only, I decided to get more involved by offering myself as an au pair instructor in a diving centre, for the month of August. I decided to send my application to all diving centres in Southern Italy and an opportunity came from Diving Cala Levante located in Pantelleria.
From 2002 to 2014 I spent all my holidays working in the diving centre there.
In recent years I have become a partner of the centre and, for quite some time now, I have managed it personally, with enthusiasm, passion, sacrifice and success.
To achieve this, I dedicated most of my weekends to collaborating with the best Italian diving centres, with the aim of learning the secrets of a winning project.

Today, I am a diving instructor of three different didactics, with at least two thousand dives behind me. I taught more than two hundred divers to go underwater and to specialise. I made more than three hundred people feel the thrill of breathing with scuba tanks for the first time. I think I spent more than three thousand hours underwater in all.
I learned, as self-taught, to photograph the underwater environment and lately I have been dedicating myself with interest to video recordings.
Driven by the desire to know more about the world I am in love with, I deepened my knowledge of marine biology.
I have always enjoyed writing and sharing my experiences. I have been doing it for years but I jealously kept my writings in the document folder of my laptop. Then I started publishing my travel stories, or sometimes simply the stories of my dives, on a website, the forerunner of a blog. I created it together with a dear friend with whom I shared a piece of my diving history.
Throughout the years in which I was a member of the diving centre of Pantelleria, I created and managed the Facebook page and the YouTube channel of the diving. In addition, I personally took care of all the marketing and communication activities. I wrote and published some articles for the most important magazines of the field.
I discovered myself to be an aggregator of people, both virtual and non-virtual.

What I would like to do with this blog is to improve the knowledge of diving while being light and easy about it, to offer new perspectives on this world with a new language and to give everyone the opportunity to still smell the scent of the sea.

Floating, silently, in the blue.

Thank you👌

Stefano Sibona

a Scuba Storyteller