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 are 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 at St. Paul's Hospital. 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.

"Considering 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," explains Krack, who was born in Prince Albert, Sask., and moved to Vancouver in 1995.

Two years in, the film crew went to Japan, where they discovered dolphins were being slaughtered in a remote cove. Krack and Cruickshank arrived a little while after the rest of the crew, 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 recounts.

"There's guards, there's razor-wire. Two weeks earlier, a woman from [a non-government organization] had been beaten up, all her equipment was smashed and she was thrown on a train and threatened and told never to come back. We could get arrested on false charges and never be allowed [back] into Japan.

"They said, 'We completely understand if you guys don't want to go this far with us.' And we said, 'Sign us up. What can we do?'"

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

The trick was, they were being followed during the day, so they had to do it at 2 or 3 in the morning, after they had slipped past the people tailing them. Which meant they had to do their dives into pitch blackness, what Cruickshank calls "dark water."

"We kind of know where we are in the water depending on how many kicks we've done," she said.

"Because you couldn't see your watch down there or anything. We had planned on doing a maximum of 130 feet, and if we didn't come across the bottom we'd come up and move in a little bit closer. We were trying to find a good balance between being close enough that you would pick up the sounds and hopefully some images, but not so close that their divers that retrieve the bodies would find the camera.

"We were pretty lucky. I think the first dive we did we came across the bottom at 80 feet or something. We were in and out really quick, trying to out of there before we were discovered."

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

"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 and all that sort of thing."

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 that would have slowed them down.

Take a movie camera and microphone down eight storeys 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.

"That was swimming down with a mono-fin and back up again on my own power. My first world record in 2001 was no limit, which was riding a sled down and a lift bag back up, and it was 136 metres, or 447 feet. The 88 metre one is much harder, though, because you're doing it all yourself."

Krack is Cruickshank's coach and trainer, and they also teach the sport.

"We have been all over the world," said Krack. "Japan, Norway, New Zealand, Egypt, Bermuda, Cayman, Bahamas, Fiji, Rangaroa, all over."