Meredith Tanguay

Tanguay is a GUE instructor teaching Fundamentals, Tech 1 and Cave 1, and owns Wet Rocks Diving; she splits her time between High Springs in north Florida cave country and Hawaii's Big Island, and travels to teach. ScubaBoard describes her as "one of the most popular and busiest instructors for Fundies and Cave", and she is one of the handful of names given whenever someone asks r/scuba for cave instructors in Florida — including, repeatedly, when the question is specifically about women teaching cave. She is also on the short list of cave instructors who will teach in backmount rather than requiring sidemount. A six-day Cave 1 course report from North Florida is the most detailed account of her teaching. The student had already done TDI Intro and came in with a teammate whose Tech 1 was used locally as the benchmark, and still found the class reset their expectations: the failure drills started far earlier than anticipated, with cascading failures on the second reel run, and no two classes build the same way because she pitches the progression at the team in front of her. The week ran through Blue Grotto, Peacock Springs, Madison Blue, Ginnie and Orange Grove — deliberately stepping up flow from none to moderate — with no-visibility exits, gas-sharing in flow, lost-line drills and unconscious-diver recovery. What that report returns to is the debriefing: "extremely detailed and focused feedback", enough that the student could name exactly what each day had cost them and improved measurably across it. Their conclusion was that they came out a better diver generally, not only in the overhead. A separate r/scuba account of her Fundamentals class calls it "the most fun scuba class I've taken", and a GUE Instructor Examiner sat in on another. Her students write on forums rather than on Google, which is typical of GUE students.