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Is the diving industry facing an existential threat from coronavirus?

Thread Status: Hello , There was no answer in this thread for more than 60 days.
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I had not read it before but now I have. It paints a pretty dismal picture for sure but then it did end with "Divers and customers will get back in the water and want to go diving. While we’ve seen a lot of webinars going on, give some thought to how best to keep things fun and interesting for your clients. Fourth Element’s Underbathwater Photographer of the Year competition and International Training’s #DiveStrong initiatives are great examples of showing support in unique ways."

Did you mean it or were you just trying to be positive? :)

It occurs to me that a lot of what was said could apply to many other industries, although the fact that diving is discretionary does make it sound more dire. And it also seems to mostly apply to scuba and scuba tourism. My problem is the opposite of yours. I tend to focus on the local while you are looking at global, and my focus is on freedive spearfishing. From reading the local forums, demand for spearguns and kit to go with them seems to still be strong. Daryl Wong seems to be using this time when he can't drill teeth to catch up on speargun orders and he reports shipping a lot of them. For me things will be back to normal as soon as I feel safe taking other divers in my boat. I'm not quite sure what that is going to take, maybe more testing or even a vaccine, but two boat loads of good friends were out shooting fish at San Clemente and Catalinia Islands this weekend. The virus didn't bother them a bit. Of course at age 81 I'm in a higher risk group and most people who go on ventilators at my age don't come off alive and those who do are seriously impaired. But I don't know of other divers in that situation, so the main effect of the virus here is closing of beaches and launch ramps, and I think that will be easing soon.

PS, an afterthought. My son is a United Airlines 787 pilot and is now in the air on the way to Sydney. He has a 39 honor layover and I suppose that might be enough time for a dive if he were so inclined. But the airline has directed the crew to stay in their hotel rooms.

But I am focused on my local bubble, so its good to be reminded of the big picture.
 
The local bubble... I think the big picture is the bubble.

Perhaps this crisis might spark some interesting local diving industry. As FoxFish said, spearfishing is one of those activities that won't go away in a crisis and might infact become more popular. So perhaps this can shift focus from the big equipment manufacturers like Cressi to national or even local producers. Spearguns are already produced all around the world, but the rest of the equipment is still very much limited to Italy.
 
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