Duane struggled to overcome his fear of water, but thanks to a patient instructor and lots of determination he met the challenge and earned his open water scuba certification in 2015. He fell in love with scuba on his second ocean dive, when he and Lisa did a Manta Ray night dive in Hawaii. After that he signed up for more training and earned his Advanced and Rescue diver certifications over the next 12 months. Then he realized he wanted to share his love of the ocean and scuba with others and help them overcome those same fears he faced to find what could be thier passion for the underwater world. So, he started his journey into professioinal diving that summer and by the end of 2016 was a Divemaster. He pressed on to become an Assitant instructor in 2017 and an Open Water Instructor in 2018. When he isn’t teaching a class he can usually be found diving with his camera in hand. He is a Public Safety Diver with the all volunteer Lee’s Summit Underwater Rescue dive team, where he has served as Training Officer, President, and Secretary.

Duane also manages our service department. As a certified PSI/PCI cylinder inspector and trained service technician for several scuba equipment lines, including Ocean Reef and HOG/Edge, he is capable of servicing all our gear and working with customers to keep their gear in top condition.

Outside of SCUBA, Duane is a nerd and runs a small consultancy doing custom software development. He also travels around the United States (and internationally) speaking at technical conferences on the technologies he uses and has been recognized by Microsoft with their MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Award for several years because of his community work.

Duane is certified as both a SDI Open Water Instructor and PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer. He can teach many specialties through both agencies, including:

• Advanced Buoyancy Control/Peak Performance Buoyancy
• Air Fill Station Technician*
• Altitude
• Boat
• Computer Nitrox/Enriched Air
• Deep
• Delayed Surface Marker Buoy (DSMB)
• Diver Propulsion Vehicle (DPV)
• Drift
• Equipment Specialist
• Fish Identification 
• Full Face Mask
• Marine Ecosystems Awareness Diver*
• Night & Limited Visibility
• Project Aware**
• Search and Recovery*
• Shore and Beach Diver*
• Solo Diver*
• Underwater Naturalist**
• Underwater Navigation
• Underwater Digital Photography
• Underwater Video
• Wreck

*SDI Only
** PADI Only