Bios – Who we are

The people behind Lagona Divers

Christian Brückl

The oldest of the bunch is Christian, a true Bavarian. After his university studies in business administration, he treated himself to a diving holiday in Dahab. In 1995, the place was still very simple, to say the least. As a fresh PADI AOWD, he started his CMAS instructor training already on the second day of his stay. The planned diving week turned into a month and many more followed. Parallel to his daily work in Germany, he “tinkered” with a distribution system for Lagona Divers at night in his 34-square-metre flat in Munich and became a partner in the dive centre in Dahab in the same year. After 4 years, a decision had to be made. By then he had already reached the rank of Examiner and Lagona Divers largely ruled his life. So in the end, Christian gave up his “civilian” profession. His company share in Lagona Divers quickly grew to 100% and the Egyptian company was followed by a management company in Germany in 1999 and even his own diving tour operator, “Lagona Travel”, in 2002. At times he operated dive centres in Croatia, Thailand and for a long time also in Indonesia until he decided in 2018 to focus only on his three dive centres in Egypt.

Christian mostly works in the background at Lagona Divers. He is responsible for the general organisation and management. Thus, he is mainly responsible for our travel arrangements, contract arrangements and the organisation of our customer care before and after a stay at one of our dive centres.

Dive Professional Status

  • CMAS Instructor ***
  • IDA Course Director ****
  • SSI Divemaster Instructor

Pure diving fun! is only possible with high service quality!

Motto of Christian

Kerstin Olbrich

Born in Austria and inspired by endless episodes of Jacques-Yves Cousteau films, Kerstin discovered her love of travel and the sea at an early age. This led to a university degree in marine biology. For her, it was only a logical step to start diving as well, and that changed everything for her. To escape the cold lakes of Austria, she worked in Croatia as a divemaster, did an internship on La Palma to get her first instructor level with CMAS and finally came to Egypt in 2012. Kerstin worked briefly in Nuweiba, but after completing her PADI IDC, she changed her permanent location to Dahab. She started working for Lagona Divers at Tropitel Dahab Oasis and became an SSI instructor. In her spare time she decided to try technical diving and it was clear to her that firstly she had a completely wrong impression of technical diving and secondly that somehow this had to be the focus of her future!

Together with Andy, Kerstin is responsible for the organisational management of our dive centres in the area of recreational diving. Personally, she also takes care of the training in technical diving, where she passes on her knowledge to her students as an Instructor Trainer for the organisations SSI, IANTD and TDI. Her greatest passion is closed circuit scuba diving. As an instructor on X-CCR and Hollis PrismII, she can train interested rebreather divers up to hypoxic CCR diver. In addition, she is the only registered service technician in Egypt for the X-CCR.

Dive Professional Status

  • SSI Instructor Trainer
  • SSI XR Instructor Trainer
  • TDI Advanced Trimix Instructor Trainer
  • IANTD Hypoxic Trimix Instructor Trainer
  • IANTD CCR Hypoxic Trimix Instructor
  • X-CCR Service Technician
  • Apeks Service Technician

Eat, sleep, rebreath!

Motto of Kerstin

Andreas “Andy” Süess

After an introductory dive in 2008 during a holiday in Tunisia, Andy fell in love with scuba diving. Shortly after returning to Switzerland, he signed up for an OWD course, which he completed in the cold waters of Lake Zurich. After that, there was no stopping him and he completed his divemaster and instructor training while helping out at a local dive shop. Even then, he discovered his passion for technical diving when he completed an IANTD Advanced Nitrox course with a local instructor. In 2012 it was time to move to warmer waters and he moved permanently to Dahab. There he got a job as a scuba diving instructor at Lagona Divers in Happy Life Village and switched to SSI. On his days off, he continued his technical diving training and achieved the level of Hypoxic Trimix Instructor in 2014.

Together with Kerstin, he manages the recreational diving part of our dive centres. In the area of technical diving, he is also responsible for the training of our guests as an Instructor Trainer for IANTD and Advanced Trimix Instructor at TDI. With great empathy, he almost always succeeds in meeting even the high demands of our technical divers. Whether it’s your first diving attempts in the double tank or a guided technical dive to 130m.

Dive Professional Status

  • SSI Instructor Trainer
  • SSR XR Instructor Trainer
  • IANTD Normoxic Trimix Instructor Trainer
  • IANTD Expedition Trimix Instructor
  • TDI Advanced Trimix Instructor
  • Apeks Service Technician

Keep calm and dive on!

Motto of Andy

Lagona Divers

Kerstin, Christian and Andy met in Dahab back in 2012. At that time, Christian already had 18 years in the professional diving business under his belt. Kerstin and Andy just started their professional career as dive instructors with a job at Lagona Divers – Dahab. Soon the two had more practical experience and dives than Christian, who even then hardly ever got into the water because of his office job.

They parted ways in 2015 when Andy and Kerstin were given the opportunity to take over Dahab Divers Technical from their former mentors and instructor trainers Jonas Samuelson, Erik Brown and Aron Arngrimson. For the next 7 years, it was all about teaching, instructing and training in the field of technical diving.

The contact between the three never completely broke off. When Christian was in Dahab again in 2021, they met for dinner as usual to catch up. They knew from the beginning that there were many parallels, but also many complementary possibilities between them. After a few beers, they decided that a pandemic would be a good time to join forces. When they sobered up again, they realised that this was indeed beneficial for everyone.

This is the story of how Lagona Divers became an Instructor Training Centre also for technical divers and how the recreational diving section of Lagona Divers came into highly professional hands.

Enjoy the dive side of life!

Motto of Lagona Divers