Former diver honored by friends and family

Doug Fraser - 

yes, they had all purchased a piece of his scuba-diving equipment that they added to the gear they carried on their own dives.

They had even had a headstone made of a granite pedestal he had recovered from a wreck off Nauset Beach in Orleans.

But what about something that really spoke to them about the guy they knew. The guy with the infectious laugh, who didn't waste time worrying, but saw life as an adventure. He was a banker for 22 years, but spent every free moment outside of family time and work, on boats, searching out and diving on shipwrecks.

"I think Alec always wanted to be a marine biologist, but he never had that education, so he took on diving," said his father Revis McGinley.

For 23 years, and over 1,000 dives, McGinley was dive teacher Don Ferris' apt pupil, and diving partner. He attained the black belt of diving, becoming a master diver.

"He had a tremendous eye for seeing things underwater, and was a natural for finding underwater artifacts," recalled Ferris.

For the past five years, McGinley and Don McNichol, 64, both Brewster residents, had been inseparable buddies on the sea and on land.

"You call people up and they can't go for one reason or another, but he'd go," said McNichol. "It was a really big loss for me. I couldn't believe it when his dad called me. It was just devastating."

Last winter, at a gathering of 50 divers who had all dived with McGinley, Ferris held up a brass porthole he'd salvaged off the wreck of the Horatio Hall and proposed a memorial. A magnificent shipwreck nearly 300 feet in length, the Hall sank in 1909 a few miles off Chatham and was one of McGinley's favorite dives.

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