Rick Murcar

Murcar teaches TDI through Genesis Diving Institute in north Florida cave country. He posts on ScubaBoard as GDI, and one poster recommends him purely on that basis — "I've been very impressed with Rick Murcar's writings on this and other boards" — which is a reputation built in public over years. A long intro-to-cave course report is the fullest account of his teaching and it is unusually specific. The student said at the outset that he wanted real training rather than a card; Murcar's answer was that cards are earned, and the report is a record of him meaning it. Months of phone and email preparation came first — gear, reading, skills to practise — more, the student writes, than he would ever have expected from an instructor. The class itself ran land drills in Murcar's own back garden before the water, then Ginnie: reels and mask-off work in the Ballroom, then the Ear, with drills always run on the exit and in flow. One dive cascaded an entanglement, an out-of-gas and a total light failure together, and finished with a blacked-out exit through a restriction. The word the report keeps returning to is THINK. Murcar did not want skills performed, he wanted them reasoned about, and answered questions with questions. Every dive was debriefed on the surface with feedback the student describes as unfailingly constructive — "I never felt like I was being beaten up, just that there were more things I needed to THINK about." The consensus he had been given beforehand was "tough but fair, thorough and no nonsense, with a great sense of humour", and he found all of it accurate. Another poster doing intro training with him separately calls him a wealth of information before the class even began.