Vancouver didn't have a great night at the Oscars Sunday. Local nominees for the sci-fi thriller District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell, Julian Clarke, Peter Muyzers and Dan Kaufmann) and Terry Gilliam's fantasy The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Monique Prudhomme) were shut out of the winner's circle.

But there was joy in Coquitlam when The Cove won best documentary. It's an American film, shot in Japan, but two of the key players are Canadians: divers Mandy-Rae Cruickshank and Kirk Krack.

The couple didn't make it down to Hollywood for the Academy Awards. They were at home with their baby daughter, Kaila Marine Krack, who was born Feb. 23.

But their screams could probably be heard in California when The Cove won.

"We jumped up and down and screamed and scared our new daughter so much it took us an hour to get her back to sleep," laughed Krack, 41.

"It was surreal," said Cruickshank, 35. "When we got involved with it, it was just a made-for-TV documentary that they were hoping to sell to the Discovery Channel or something. We had no idea it was going to go as far as an Oscar."

In fact, the documentary made a radical change in the middle of filming.

"Originally it was going to be a half-hour TV show about the beauty of the oceans and the pressure and the impact they're under," Krack said.

Two years in, the film crew went to Japan and discovered dolphins were being slaughtered in a remote cove. Krack and Cruickshank arrived and were told there was a new direction.

"They showed us the dolphin slaughter, and at the end said, 'We want to pursue this more, but it's dangerous,'" Krack recounted.

"And we said, 'Sign us up. What can we do?'"

Cruickshank and Krack wound up as part of a "black ops" crew that quietly slipped into the cove where the dolphins were slaughtered. They swam out with an underwater movie camera and microphone, then dove 80 feet to the bottom.

The trick was, they were being followed during the day, so they had to do it at two or three in the morning, after they had slipped past the people tailing them. Which meant they had to do their dives into pitch blackness.

"Really what we wanted to get was the sound of the slaughter, the panic of the dolphins, the screaming of the dolphins," Krack said.

"We'd go in at night when they already had a bunch of dolphins in the bay; the slaughter would happen the next morning. The next night we would go back and have to retrieve everything. It was night operations. You see it in the movie through thermal camera imaging and night vision."

Cruickshank figures they were in the water about 15 minutes, swimming to and from shore, and about a minute in the dive. They are "free divers," which means they dive without aid of scuba gear or breathing apparatus.

This was key in a clandestine operation like this, because they didn't have clunky equipment to slow them down.

Taking a movie camera and microphone down eight storeys underwater while holding your breath may sound hard, but for Cruickshank, it's a breeze. The Edmonton native has held seven free diving world records, such as holding her breath underwater for six minutes and twenty-five seconds.

"My last world record was diving 289 feet, or 88 metres," she said.

jmackie@vancouversun.com