A diving prince, sunken treasure and snared by the Titanic: Joe MacInnis on his ‘rip-roaring’ life as an ocean adventurer

At 88, the Canadian reflects on a golden era of underwater discovery and how shipwrecks and the cruel sea are the ‘greatest of all teachers’Joe MacInnis admits there are simply too many places to begin telling the story of life in the ocean depths. At 88, the famed Canadian undersea explorer, has many decades to draw on. There was the time he and a Russian explorer and deep-water pilot, Anatoly Sagalevich, were snagged by a telephone wire strung from the pilot house of the Titanic, trapping the pair two and a half miles below the surface.Another might be the moment he and his team stared in disbelief through a porthole window at the Edmund Fitzgerald, the 222-metre (729ft) ship that vanished 50 years ago into the depths of Lake Superior, so quickly that none of the crew could issue a call for help. MacInnis and his team were the first humans to lay eyes on the wreck.MacInnis diving in Lake Huron, off Tobermory, Canada, in 1969. Photograph: Don Dutton/Toronto Star/Getty Images Continue