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Full Cave Instructors Worldwide
Full Cave in worldwide: 151 instructors on TecDiveTools, with the agencies and courses each teaches, and a summary of what students say.
151 instructors
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Full Cave in worldwide: 151 instructors on TecDiveTools, with the agencies and courses each teaches, and a summary of what students say.
TecDiveTools lists 151 instructors teaching Full Cave worldwide.
Listings are ordered by how much evidence exists about their technical diving, not by a star rating, with any paid Featured listing shown first and marked as such (how rankings work). 76 of these 151 carry reviews we have read and classified as being about technical or overhead training. The count excludes recreational certifications by name, so a busy resort does not outrank a one-instructor cave operation on the volume of its reef trips. Separately, 70 have a written synthesis of what reviewers say about them. How we read and count reviews.
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About the course
Full Cave is the core cave-diving certification — it removes the depth/distance limits of Intro to Cave and covers complex navigation, multiple gas switches, team procedures, and emergency response across jumps, circuits, and traverses in a real cave system. It's for divers who've completed Intro to Cave and want unrestricted cave access rather than the conservative penetration limits that course imposes. It's the milestone most cave-training progressions are built around: everything after it (DPV Cave, Stage Cave, Cave Decompression, cave surveying) assumes Full Cave as a baseline. No fixed depth — cave dives are limited by gas planning and distance from the exit rather than a stated maximum depth; the course itself runs over 8 dives and 240 minutes of accumulated bottom time in real cave systems.
151 instructors on TecDiveTools teach TDI Full Cave worldwide: Mexico (81), United States (44), Thailand (12), Indonesia (8), Malta (3) and Philippines (3). Each is listed above.
Published prices for TDI Full Cave worldwide range across 7 centres in the TecDiveTools directory — roughly US$1,000 to US$1,800 at current exchange rates. In each centre's own currency: $1,050–$1,800 (4 centres), THB 60,000 (2 centres) and MX$19,000 (1 centre). 7 centres charge by the day instead, which is not comparable with a course total. Prices differ mainly in what they include, so compare the inclusions before comparing the numbers. Prices were last checked in September 2026.
Between 2 and 6 days, based on the durations 10 centres publish for it worldwide. The time depends on the centre's schedule, weather, and how quickly the required skills are demonstrated — agencies set a minimum number of dives, not a fixed number of days.
At the same tier in TecDiveTools' cross-agency comparison, instructors worldwide also teach IANTD Cave Diver (63), RAID Cave 2 (4), NSS-CDS Cave Diver (4), NSS-CDS Advanced Cave Diver (1) and ANDI Full Cave (1). They are comparable rather than interchangeable — each agency sets its own standards and card, so check which one your next course accepts.
