Divers everywhere have felt the impact of the pandemic. Recreational divers giving up dive holidays and staying home to deal with more pressing issues. Dive professionals facing job loss and uncertainty. Dive businesses, clubs and boat charters dealing with entirely new challenges. Some of us experiencing illness ourselves, or caring for loved-ones.

As diving begins to resume in many places, it is likely that we will continue to face ongoing uncertainty and concerns about our health. How the virus may or may not affect us as scuba divers is still largely unknown, but taps into a deep concern shared by divers, … the possibility of not being able to scuba dive in future.

But where there is fear, we can go beneath the surface and tend to find there is something there that we care deeply about. Over the last few months we’ve seen this everywhere we look. Divers all over the world are connecting and doing what matters to face Covid.

Dive centres are keeping their divers motivated with online socials and courses. Divers are supporting their clubs and centres to stay afloat till we can all get back in the water. Dive media and social influencers are creating and sharing informative and entertaining content to divers at home. Dive equipment manufacturers are producing new products to help divers and instructors provide safer training. Dive educators are providing webinars and setting up groups to keep scuba divers learning and connecting to knowledge.

There is a lot of stress, uncertainty and fear going around. But there is also innovation, connection and kindness.

So if you are looking for ways to stay calm, kind and focus on doing what matters in a time of stress, download and follow this free guide. It was produced by Russ Harris, for the World Health Organisation. This is the approach I use. As well as being helpful in facing Covid, it also contains a lot of references to skills practices that can benefit us as divers underwater and at the dive site.