About Lisa Malachowsky
Lisa (she/her) has more than 35 years of professional experience in both the diving and motorcycling industries. She is a PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) assistant scuba instructor and a Total Control Training motorcycle safety instructor.
Diving
Lisa learned to dive in 1986 and became a PADI assistant scuba instructor in 1994. She has worked as a professional divemaster and has logged well over a thousand non-training dives in world-class locations such as Indonesia, Fiji, the Philippines, Turks and Caicos Islands, Mexico, and many other places.
She worked with a scuba shop in the San Francisco Bay Area and assisted in many PADI Open Water classes and local charter trips. Lisa has logged over 500 drysuit dives in the waters of Monterey Bay. The Monterey Breakwater, although seen as a training site, is one of Lisa’s favorite shore dives, where she claims to see something new on every dive.
She has always considered herself an unsung pioneer of early Indonesian diving. Lisa has been diving there since 1997. In those days, most diving was “exploratory.” She even did a liveaboard there with Mike Severns, a professional photographer and author, in which they charted some dive sites that we hope to revisit in 2024.
Riding
Lisa was 12 years old when her father taught her how to operate the clutch on a motorcycle. She’s been riding ever since. Having developed a passion for long-distance touring she has ridden untold miles in many countries, on multiple continents.
Her career in the motorcycle industry includes positions at major dealerships managing finance, parts, and service departments as well as being a general manager, and working for multiple parts and accessories companies.
Lisa is a long-standing member of the American Motorcyclist Association, the BMW Riders Association, and Women on Wheels. She has trained at the BMW Performance Center and with Jimmy Lewis in the US and Jo Rust in South Africa. Her writings on motorcycling have appeared in American Motorcyclist, the magazine of the AMA; On the Level, the magazine of the BMW Riders Association; and BMW Owners News, the magazine of the BMW Motorcycle Owners Association. She is also a Total Control Training motorcycle safety instructor and an Accident Scene Management lead instructor.
