Steve Haining and Ciara Antoski went deeper than the no-decompression limit at a wreck in 50 metres of water off the coast of Florida for their record-setting attempt
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So he, Antoski and a team of divers visited Fathom Five National Marine Park in Tobermory, Ont. There, under 6.4 metres of frigid Georgian Bay water, they staged their record-setting shoot at the rudder of the W.L. Wetmore, a steamer built in 1871 in Cleveland, Ohio, wrecked during a storm in November 1901.
But Haining and Antoski have smashed that by diving almost 10 metres deeper, beyond the so-called no-decompression limit, which is the depth beyond which divers must pause on the way back to the surface to avoid decompression sickness, commonly known as “the bends.”
Haining says Antoski contacted him about the same time the record was taken from them. “She wanted to go after the record again, so she started training to be a technical diver,” he says, referring to the skills needed for such a deep dive.
They knew of other teams trying to set their own records — he’s always happy to advise others who share his passion — but says “the race to the bottom was 130 feet, and so we wanted to go beyond that no-decompression limit.”
He adds: “This shoot that we did is the first time in history that a photoshoot with a model has ever happened beyond that limit of diving. And it was 33 and a half feet deeper than that!”
The technical aspects of such a deep dive are many — multiple tanks of oxygen for the safety of the model and crew, staged decompression on each return to the surface, and special tanks containing a mix of oxygen, nitrogen and helium to blunt the effects of nitrogen narcosis, also known as “the martini effect” for its similarities to drunkenness.
Compared to the water in Georgian Bay (about 14 degrees C), the ocean at Boca Raton, Florida, was “pool temperature,” Haining says, about 24 degrees.
Preparation was key, since the dive itself lasted less than an hour, and only about 15 minutes of that was spent on the ocean floor. What’s more, Antoski would be hampered by poor vision (since she wouldn’t be wearing a mask while the camera was shooting), buoyancy every time she took a breath of air from her tank, and of course an inability to speak.
“This is part of the fun of being a portrait photographer who’s comfortable with their job, is being in these situations where you plan something and now you eliminate all the communication and much of the visibility. And now I hope my plan was exactly what I intended and it works out when you’re down there.”
It did. He’s happy with the results, and especially the fact that the new shoot felt “like a continuation of that original one that I did with Ciara. It gets for me the emotion that I wanted. I love that about it.”
Haining isn’t planning any more deep-dive photography in the near future, but says he and Antoski might take to the skies for their next collaboration.
“Her boyfriend is a paraglider (pilot) and so she’s for years had this idea of hanging from silks from the paraglider and having me in a separate paraglider … following them around over top of something like the Utah flood plains where the landscape is really stunning. That’s an idea she’s been pushing me to figure out.”
He adds: “I don’t think it’ll be a record by any means but it’ll make for some interesting portraits.”
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