In this episode of The Dive Locker Podcast you will learn strategies for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic as diving professionals.
Welcome To The Show!
Welcome to the dive locker podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest in diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management and dive business.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, actually I like more “unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures”. So much has changed in just even one week. Social distancing has now been added to washing hands. And now we are seeing restrictions on restaurants, churches, bars, even beaches. Homeschooling is now a thing.
Obviously there are social and economical impacts with all of this. But as cliched as it sounds we can’t panic nor loose hope. We will get through this. Darcy Kieran with Scubanomics says this in his latest blog post “The dive industry bounced back after 9/11 and after the 2008 financial crisis. We will bounce back again. The question is how well your own business will do, meanwhile.”
Often hope comes from wisdom. We can turn to leaders for wisdom and guidelines but remember this is new to everyone. So bear that in mind when hearing or reading news or social media.
In today’s episode I want to highlight some in our industry who are making recommendations of how to weather this successfully, and I want to share many of these recommendations.
- DAN’s recommendations
- PADI’s recommendations
- Madacide-1 a hospital-grade equipment and surface disinfectant
- Gurpreet K Gill quote on Coronavirus response
How to Use Madacide-1
Now Madacide‘s directions say to use it at full concentration. BUT then you have to rinse it off with fresh water. If you miss that step, then a milky white formation appears and it is too harsh for contact with mouth, nose and eyes. What we do is make a 9 to 1 solution – that’s one part of Madacide to 9 parts of water. In our case that’s one cup of Madacide to 9 cups of water, that makes for a nice 10 cups in our Rubbermaid 12cup/3L container. By the way that size container is easy to store and is just the right size to dunk items into.
But here’s the trick, we are using that ratio because the students will fresh water rinse first, then they dip the items in the Madacide solution last and then we put it in the dive locker and let it dry with the Madacide solution on it. No rinsing required – there is no aftertaste, smell or caustic issues with the body. And this still kills everything because of the length of time the Madacide solution is on the gear.
Our dive program rents every piece of equipment so we have students disinfect everything. After fresh water rinsing, snorkels go in, masks go in, the whole second stage primary and alternate second stage go in, and the BCD inflator hose. Anything the mouth has been in contact with.
A little bit of Madacide goes a long way. One gallon bottle will cost about $54 and a case of four one gallon bottles is $170. The best part is this will last a long time because your solution works for multiple rinsing sessions. We just put the lid back on the Rubbermaid container and it stays good for several days. Our dive program averages two cups per week, that means one gallon is lasting 8 weeks. That’s with pool sessions four nights a week and both days of every weekend. Your dive center may be less for your rental equipment use, so your Madacide stock will last you a while. Again, I have my Amazon Associates links to both the one gallon and the case of four one gallon of Madacide.
If you would like to see all of these decontamination procedures demonstrated – go to my YouTube channel TheScubaGuru and look for my new Beyond the Standard video on Disinfecting Rental Scuba Gear.
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Thanks For Listening!
That’s it for today, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher, that way you’ll be notified of new episodes as soon as they go live and please leave a rating. Items talked about in this episode can be found on the show notes Page at scubaguru.com and there you can also click the microphone and leave us a comment. Thanks again. We’ll see you in the next episode. Safe diving and take good care of my friends.
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