some more info to shed light on the story..maybe this might quell this little fued..at least for a little while.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20378335-2,00.html
Safety suit didn't fit Irwin image
By Hedley Thomas and Michael McKenna
September 09, 2006 12:00am
ON the afternoon before his final adventure, Steve Irwin sat on the aft deck of Deepstar, an aluminium catamaran moored at Batt Reef off Port Douglas, and looked wide-eyed at his host Pete West's newest purchase.
It was a modern-day suit of armour. A head-to-toe stainless steel mesh outfit, complete with full-face helmet.
The creation of a San Diego-based company specialising in marine equipment, it had been custom-made to protect its wearer from all but the most determined sea creatures.
Even tiger sharks - known to devour stingrays, serrated barb and all - would have found the sections of steel unappealing.
The wildlife guru's childlike enthusiasm - his best friend and manager, John Stainton, reckoned he had never grown up - was at once obvious.
Irwin did not hold back. He picked up the heavy and unusual-looking thing. Turning it over and feeling its smooth texture, he began asking questions.
"Crikey. How heavy is it, mate?" Irwin, 44, asked West, an expert diver-cinematographer and the owner of Deepstar. "It's 12 kilograms, Steve."
To meet Irwin was to immediately like him. His energy, over-the-top antics and interest in all he talked to were unique and completely genuine, and West was won over.
West, who had spent most of his life either in or on top of the water since working as a teenager at Marineland at Manly in Sydney, explained the suit's features. While the expensive high-definition cameras were heavy on land but virtually weightless in the water because of the buoyancy of the housing, the suit would still be a burden.
But with additional air in a buoyancy vest, West had no qualms. Its design permitted a good range of movement. It had cost him and his business, National Underwater and Marine Agency, about $7000 - a drop in the ocean if it could save a life. It was brand new, shipped from the US a few weeks earlier. At 49 and a new father for the first time, West started to explain to Irwin why he had taken an extra precaution that few underwater cinematographers had contemplated. He had taken risks on dives throughout the world - primarily on deep-sea oil rigs and for the military - before arriving at Port Douglas 15 years ago and falling back into cinematography. There had been close shaves, but now it was about doing all he could to ensure he would be around to watch his 10-month-old daughter, Taylor, grow up.
West had respected Irwin and admired his work from afar for years. Their meeting over soft drinks and snacks on the Father's Day Sunday afternoon, as Deepstar lay at anchor over the coral bommies teeming with turtles, rays and sharks, was their first.
The suit was unorthodox. West figured that some of his tough-as-teak mates, who wore just rubber and scuba tanks during close encounters with man-eaters, might have gently ribbed him.
To the man known to millions of people as the Crocodile Hunter, a seemingly fearless naturalist who wrestled reptiles and dangled venomous snakes around his neck while wearing khaki, the stainless steel mesh might have seemed a bit over the top.
Irwin's fans expected him to flirt with danger. Risk, whether real or perceived, was the most compelling part of the show and Irwin played it perfectly. He was not into mockery or gratuitous put-downs, but the lifesaving suit would never work for Irwin, despite his fears that one day, and probably in the sea where he was most vulnerable, an animal would get the better of him.
Irwin had just begun working with West and his crew on a documentary series, Ocean's Deadliest. There was mutual respect. But the banter on board was tinged with disappointment. Exchanging anecdotes about the triumphs of their children, the men would have preferred to have been at home on Father's Day.
They were on the water because deadlines had to be met. After shooting sequences in the waters at Agincourt, about 40 nautical miles northeast of Port Douglas, Irwin's vessel, Croc One, had motored south to Batt Reef. The bull rays were abundant because the shallows had plentiful food and there were fewer foreign threats - the big-hulled tourist vessels, transporting hundreds of day-trippers kitted for snorkelling, were too large to come close to the reef and the sea life.
On board Croc One were some of Irwin's closest friends and colleagues, people whose trust had been proved time and again.
The vessel's skipper, Chris Reed, dared not bring her in too close to the reef; the jagged coral deserved respect.
Apart from John Stainton, the film producer who had discovered Irwin and managed and marketed him to the world, there was Jamie Seymour, a marine biologist with a legendary passion for sea animals, and highly regarded cameramen Justin Lyons and Philippe Cousteau, the grandson of famous French ocean explorer Jacques. The crew members on Croc One and Deepstar were experienced at sea and trained in first aid.
Irwin's time in north Queensland in the days and weeks before he arrived at Batt Reef was typically adrenaline-charged: he had rolled in the mud with crocodiles in Lakefield National Park at Cape York and brushed over lethal stonefish at the reef of Agincourt.
In Port Douglas, Irwin was the natural attraction when he stepped from Croc One on to the marina - photographed and cheered by tourists from around Australia and abroad.
But the weather last weekend was lousy, dark and foreboding. The usual millpond-like conditions at Batt Reef had turned, with strong southeasterly winds creating a chop on the water and stirring up the sand in the shallows. For the high-definition cameras, visibility was soupy.
Irwin, already frustrated for a couple of days before the weekend at his inability to capture on film excitement in the water, was settling for alternatives - deadly cone shells and sea snakes - when someone mentioned Batt Reef's schools of rays. The rays are usually gentle, but their barbs can be dangerous, and footage of a large bull ray gracefully turning around the coral was better than nothing.
On Monday morning, Irwin was bursting with energy and a determination to make up for the disappointment of the previous days. Because of its deeper draft, Croc One was moored about 1km north of Deepstar.
Two of West's diving crew were in the water, checking anchors and preparing for the afternoon shoot, while he and marine biologist friend Teresa Carrette stayed on board. They could see the white inflatable dinghy from Croc One about 500m away; the tide was turning as Irwin, snorkelling in his khakis, shadowed a medium-large ray while Lyons filmed.
Suddenly the dinghy was racing towards Deepstar at full speed, and instinctively West knew something was amiss. The inflatable bumped into the starboard quarter and Lyons yelled: "Steve's been hit by a stingray!".
The predicament was dire. Irwin, lying in the inflatable, was not moving. There was an obvious wound to his chest and at first glance it looked dangerously close to his heart. He had a reputation as the guru of high drama and edge-of-your-seat TV, but this take was not part of the script.
The underwater camera lay on the floor of the dinghy. Lyons, who filmed the strike but did not realise exactly what had happened until he saw blood in the water, appeared gravely worried.
On Croc One, most of the crew remained oblivious to the crisis. West, who had been a medic on oil rigs, summed it up quickly. If it had been a gash to the foot or some such injury, Irwin would have been pulled on board and given professional first aid but the volume of blood around his chest looked serious. He told Lyons to speed to Croc One and Seymour.
As the inflatable sped off, the first radio call went out. The Port Douglas Coast Guard did not respond on the emergency VHF channel 16, so West called for the next nearest. "Coast Guard Cairns. Coast Guard Cairns. This is Deepstar. We are in need of immediate medical assistance."
In the conversation with the radio operator in Cairns, no names were used at first. But on Croc One, the skipper, Reed, heard the plea for help. The inflatable was seconds away from Irwin's 20m vessel and the crew readied for action.
After Cairns Coast Guard switched to channel 73, so the situation could be discussed without interruption from others on the water who had heard the first distress call, Seymour, who had been monitoring the conversation and had assessed Irwin's critical condition, came on the radio. He upgraded the alert and asked for an emergency evacuation.
Stainton would later reveal he believed Irwin was already dead, but nobody was prepared to give up hope. There was a frantic but well-organised drill as the crew took it in turns to try revive him. Although Croc One was in deeper water at Batt Reef, it still had to proceed with caution around the coral until the throttles could be pushed fully forward. But the next radio call was grave. Seymour wanted to know if West had a defibrillator on board. Negative. He had plenty of oxygen, but nothing to restart a heart. The question had said it all.
All the way into Low Isles -- the closest shelter and heliport between Batt Reef and Port Douglas -- the crew on Croc One kept trying. They had abandoned the inflatable and another dinghy, the Black Pearl, both of which West recovered. "How is Steve doing?" West asked after receiving a call from Lyons to ask if the camera had been retrieved.
"He's in the hands of professionals," Lyons replied.
Having been asked to secure the camera and ensure its tape had not malfunctioned, West hit the playback button and he and Teresa Carrette watched the last few seconds on the small view-finder. As Stainton disclosed later, the footage was graphic and shocking. West watched a medium-wide shot of Irwin paddling above a 1m-wide bull ray, which suddenly whipped its tail and barb into his chest.
"When I saw the film it explained exactly what had happened," West told The Weekend Australian yesterday.
"I had feared already that Steve was dead. The facts are we lost a great Australian in a tragic accident. Like everybody else in this country, I didn't know what a treasure we had until we lost it.
"The simple things kill. And it happens too quickly."