St Lawrence River is the focus of a new French language web site. Dive maps, underwater photographs and articles about fresh water diving are to be found on Fred Willeme's new site which is located at: http://www.qbc.clic.net/~willeme/index.html.
Child's drowning sparks Wallaceburg clean-up in May
The Rotary Club of Wallaceburg, Ontario will be working with Ontario and Michigan divers to clean up a section of the Sydenham River. On May 30th divers will be in the water removing refuse from the bottom of that section of the river that runs through downtown Wallaceburg.
"This is a harbour dive with blackout conditions," explained Rotary President Jim Tumelty. "This cleanup has been prompted by a young boy who drowned when he became entangled on a submerged bicycle."
The Saturday morning clean-up dive is being coordinated by Riverside Watersports in nearby Sarnia. The town is located between Sarnia and Windsor and is 7 miles east of Algonac, Michigan.
Certified divers interested in helping out should contact Riverside Watersports' Dale McDougal at (519) 332-5370. His e -mail address is scuba@netrover.com.
Scuba writer trains the stars to get wet in Sphere
Imagine putting big box-office stars like Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson into 150 pounds of commercial diving gear and then sending them underwater to perform for the cameras. Now imagine that while they're wearing all this cumbersome gearhelmet, backpacks, weighted boots and other gearthey walk through a dark underwater cave and then become enclosed in an actual functioning airlockwithout their safety divers.
They, along with Peter Coyote, Queen Latifah and Liev Schreiber actually did all this and more on the set of the new movie Sphere which was released in Canada last month.
Based on Michael Crichton's thriller best seller of the same name, the plot has a team of scientists descending 1000 feet
underwater to investigate a mysterious spaceship lying on the bottom of the ocean.
The blockbuster film was made in a shallow San Francisco area underwater set. The big stars were able to scuba their way through the movie thanks in no small part to the work of well known scuba journalist Jean Peirce and her partner Kris Newman.
"Don't think this is just special effects," said Kris Newman, the dive instructor who had the daunting task of teaching the cast to dive. "They trained hard and actually performed underwater, taking some definite risks."
So what does it take to get Stone, Coyote, Jackson and Hoffman to the point where they felt comfortable in life-support equipment in a claustrophobic underwater environment.
"Besides nice, fat million-dollar contracts." laughed Newman. "it takes a well-thought-out training program with a lot of task-loading exercises, in addition to personal caring and nerves of steel!"
Newman and Peirce managed the entire dive unit at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California. The pair, through their company Independent Scuba, built an enormous dive shop on the set and hired a crew of 7 scuba instructors. The Warner studio brought along an additional dozen safety divers to work on set.
It was crowded inside the huge indoor tank. In addition to the cast there were 12 safety divers, six underwater stunt doubles and 65 scuba-certified crew members from grips to electricians and camera operators. The Independent Scuba employees and the Sphere alone logged more than 5,000 hours underwater.
The shoot ended safely, on schedule and within budget. And the cast? According to Jean Peirce, they loved the water. "Sharon Stone danced, Queen Latifah played basketball, the guys had Ping-Pong-ball/spoon races, and a couple of them very nearly fell asleep yes, underwater."