With Southern Dive Center, Statesboro not only has a place that sells and rents scuba equipment, but one that offers classes for diving certification and specialties such as wreck diving, night diving and underwater photography.
        A checkout dive at one of northern Florida's freshwater springs is par for the second weekend of the basic Open Water Diving course. For graduates and already certified divers, frequent excursions such as one to West Palm Beach in March and another into the Georgia Aquarium's big tank in Atlanta on April 8 are planned, as are twice-annual trips to the Florida Keys.
        Instructor Joseph Glenn, 28, has been a certified diver since he was 18 and has taught other divers since he was 20. But the Southern Dive Center, at 2513 Northside Drive West, is a first-time plunge into owning a business for him and wife Haley.
        "It's something I've always wanted to do," said Joseph Glenn. "Kind of been like a little dream."

Diving firefighter
        He has a full-time job as a firefighter with the Statesboro Fire Department, where he has served the past four years. But Glenn has combined diving and firefighting for almost a decade.
        While attending Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, he became a firefighter with the Tifton Fire Department, serving about five years.
        He also worked part-time, for about three years, as manager of a dive shop owned by someone else. Eventually, he was in charge of the Tifton department's dive rescue team. Certified as a diver in 2006, in started teaching around 2008, he said.
        Here in Statesboro, Glenn actually started certifying students about a year ago, working from home on weekends. The dive shop itself, which opened informally for the first time on Black Friday, went full-time in December. He also led some diving excursions long before the shop opened.
        "I've got over 300 students I've certified, from Open Water all the way to dive master," Glenn said.
        Planning his vacations around diving, he hopes to complete his instructor-trainer certification during two weeks in Key Largo in October.
        The highest recreational diving certification available, he said, this would allow him to teach instructors how to teach.
        He then will work on his certifications in technical diving, he said.
        The courses he teaches provide Scuba Divers International, or SDI, recreational diving certifications.
        Although Glenn is qualified as a public safety diver, he is not certified to teach emergency response diving. But he has a friend in Atlanta who is, and can be called on to make that training available through Southern Dive Center, he said.

All in the family
        While Joseph Glenn is on duty as a firefighter, Haley Glenn manages the dive shop. They leased and fixed up the building, which in previous lives was a service station and home to a finance company. They added not only new paint and floorcoverings, but a couple of new walls.
        Besides a showroom, the shop now has a classroom. They also have compressor in back to fill tanks.
        Brand-new equipment, including scuba sets, with the regulator, gauge, valves and harness, at different price points, as well as masks, snorkels and fins, line the walls of the showroom. There are books on diving and cameras and lights for underwater photography. The showroom includes a display for Go-Pro cameras and accessories.
        The shop is open six days a week, Monday through Saturday.
        "It's fully locally owned and operated," said Haley Glenn. "It's just the two of us managing and working in the store right now. We do hope to be able to expand and, you know, maybe hire a couple of college students."
        Originally from Vidalia, she graduated from Georgia Southern University in 2011 with a business degree in marketing. Until recently she was a stay-at-home mom. The Glenns' son, Parks, just celebrated his first birthday. His dad, the diving instructor and firefighter, grew up in Baxley.
        They have made Statesboro their chosen home, and now the home of their business.
        Southern Dive Center isn't Statesboro's first dive shop. But Dive South, on U.S. Highway 301 South, closed years ago.
        That unrelated business had its own pool. The new Southern Dive Center does not. For the first full weekend of the two-weekend Open Water diving course, which is offered once each month, students first take their book and paper lessons in the classroom at the shop. Then they go to an aquatics pool at Splash in the Boro for their initial diving practice.
        The Glenns have a contract with Splash, which is owned by the Statesboro-Bulloch Parks and Recreation Department, to use the pools, they said.
        For the second weekend, in which the instructor must check each student's skills, the class usually travels to Blue Grotto Dive Resort, in an area of freshwater springs at Williston in northern Florida.
        Beyond these basic classes, one advanced class per month is planned. These include courses in wreck and drift diving - which yes, means diving on shipwrecks and similar structures - night and limited visibility diving, underwater photography, nitrox diving and deep diving, to 130 feet. Regular compressed air is used for most scuba diving, but nitrox is air with the proportion of oxygen to nitrogen increased to allow longer dives.

Adaptive instruction
        Joseph Glenn is also a member of Diveheart, a nonprofit organization that makes diving experiences and adaptive instruction available to people with disabilities, wounded warriors and veterans. He said he is one of just a few adaptive instructors in Georgia.
        "If you're an amputee or quadriplegic or paraplegic or wheelchair-bound, we can actually teach you how to dive," Glenn said. "It's almost like a recreational therapy."
        This leads to some unique underwater memories.
        "It's a very humbling experience when someone who's paralyzed can actually stand up for the first time on the bottom of the ocean," Glenn said. "It's pretty cool."