The Mobile diver who went deeper than anyone
Every few generations, the Gulf Coast produces someone the wider world can’t quite categorize — an athlete, scientist and artist rolled into one person. Mobile produced Mike deGruy, the underwater filmmaker, marine biologist and storyteller who filmed parts of the ocean no human had ever seen, survived a shark attack that should have ended his career, and died doing the work he loved. His life is the subject of “Diving Deep: The Life and Times of Mike deGruy,” the documentary produced by his widow and film partner, Mimi, after his death.
deGruy grew up in a family of competitive swimmers and divers, one of the athletic deGruy brothers known around Mobile’s youth sports scene. He took to the Gulf waters early, learning to scuba dive in the same coastal waters he would spend a lifetime defending, and carried that fascination with the natural world through everything that followed.
From NC State to the deep ocean
At North Carolina State University, deGruy was an All-America national diving champion — good enough, by the family’s telling, to once beat Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis in competition. He graduated in 1975 with a degree in marine zoology, then moved to Hawaii for doctoral work at the University of Hawaii and a curatorial post at the Waikiki Aquarium. From there he went to the Marshall Islands as manager of the Mid-Pacific Marine Laboratory, living on the remote atolls where much of the Pacific’s reef science was being done.
The filmmaking career started almost by accident and took over his life. Through his company, Film Crew, Inc., deGruy shot for the BBC’s “The Blue Planet,” PBS, National Geographic, TBS and the Discovery Channel, and grew from cameraman into producer and on-camera host. The awards followed — a BAFTA and an Emmy among them — and in 2004 the International Wildlife Film Festival named him Best Presenter/Host. Andrew Neal of the BBC called him “one of the world’s greatest underwater cameramen.”
Shark Week, thermal vents and Cameron
The signature moments piled up. deGruy dove on hydrothermal vents in both the Atlantic and Pacific, was part of the team that first filmed the vampire squid and the nautilus on camera, and directed the undersea photography for James Cameron’s 2005 documentary “Last Mysteries of the Titanic.” He later joined the Deepsea Challenge expedition, on which Cameron descended to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on Earth.
Television audiences knew him best from Shark Week, where his authority came from experience most presenters can’t claim: in 1978, a grey reef shark attacked him at Enewetak Atoll and severely mangled his lower right arm. He returned to the subject, not away from it, counting down the world’s shark-attack hot spots on camera. His 2010 TED talk on his love of the ocean, delivered during the Mission Blue voyage, remains one of the most-watched pieces of ocean advocacy ever filmed.
The Gulf, the spill, and the activist turn
For all the miles deGruy logged in remote oceans, his home water was always the Gulf of Mexico. He grew up in the waters around Mobile, and the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 — which threatened the very coastline where he had learned to dive — transformed him into an environmental activist. He used his visibility and his cameras to argue for protecting the waters he had grown up in, a theme that ran through his later work.
Tragically, the story ends mid-flight. In February 2012, while filming a documentary with James Cameron in Australia, the helicopter deGruy was riding in crashed at Jaspers Brush, New South Wales. He was 60.
The film, and the homecoming
In the aftermath, Mimi deGruy produced and directed “Diving Deep: The Life and Times of Mike deGruy,” tracing her husband’s path from Mobile’s waters to the deepest trenches on Earth. The film has collected awards and festival recognition, including the Audience Choice Award at the Fairhope Film Festival, and its Alabama premiere was held in Mobile in April 2019 as a benefit for the Dauphin Island Sea Lab Foundation — a fitting beneficiary for a filmmaker whose love of the sea started in the same waters the Sea Lab works to understand.
Stream it and the through-line is unmistakable: curiosity without boundaries. deGruy went places no one had gone, filmed animals no one had seen, and never stopped making the case — in person, on camera, and in front of Congress — that the ocean is worth protecting. Mobile has produced astronauts, ballplayers and musicians. It also produced the man a BBC executive called one of the world’s greatest underwater cameramen. The Gulf should keep claiming him.