PaulB once bubbled...
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The man could make so much money and have a great, clean, safe place for people to go and dive. He wouldn't hear of it though.
I'm thinking of buying the place myself and doing it. It's only $340,000. I know..that's a lot, but in the end I think it would be worth it, plus I could get some people to go in on it with me and form a partnership and all that happy crap.
I don't want to urinate on your dream but think carefully about this. I mean, that's a sh*t load of money to spend if you're not sure you'll gain it back. You'd have to charge people to dive there, maybe $5 a pop, which means, if you take out a mortgage to pay for it, that you'll need a couple of thousand divers to make regular trips there by the time it's all paid off. ABout 4500 divers a year to suck a numbre out of my thumb. On a typical Saturday you'd hve 50 divers in your pond. Is it big enough? Is it interesting enough? Where will they change? Where will they eat? Where will they fill tanks between dives? How will they get in/out of the water? If you build something for that, you'll need insurance. Even if you put a sign up that says "beach that way" with an arrow some greedy SOB playing the liability-lottery will end up suing you for it becasue if you didn't put up the sign they wouldn't have found the beach and they couldn't hvae gong diving and blah blah blah. you know how it goes.... If MacDonalds can get nailed for hot coffee..... .just think about it. And since you'll be the land owner you're exposure to liability is probably increased by an order of magnitude....... etc etc etc.
It can get complicated.
How many divres are there in your area? A big dive school will make 500 dive a year in your pond if they don't train any where else. You'd need 8 big dive schools within a short drive (45 min) to make a go of it if you only looked at training. And that's assuming that the facilities are available and you can lure them away from where they train now and somehow convince them that it's worth paying on the order of $2500 a year for..... That's asking a lot if I believe the stories I hear about how oversaturated the market is in America and how cash strapped the typical dive school is.
These are jsut some random first impressions.
R..