Volunteer divers with a Florida fire department found the body of missing Toronto filmmaker Rob Stewart, the U.S. Coast Guard and Stewart’s family confirmed Friday night.

Volunteers found Stewart’s body at a depth of 220 feet, a tweet from the coast guard said.

“It’s with a heavy heart that we share that Rob has been found peacefully in the ocean,” said Victoria Gormley, a spokesperson for Stewart’s family.

“We are so deeply grateful to everyone who helped with the search and find comfort that Rob passed doing what he loved. We are working on how best to honour his incredible work and my family asks that everyone give us some private time to grieve.”

For three days, searchers from the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S navy, local police and fire department, Border Control and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission searched the area, by air and sea, around the clock.

Gormley said Stewart’s family is “absolutely heartbroken.”

“They’re absolutely and completely devastated,” she said. “We’re deeply grateful to all the volunteers and obviously the Coast Guard. We just lost somebody that we loved deeply.”

Stewart, 37, best known for his documentary Sharkwater, hadn’t been seen since 5 p.m. Tuesday, when scuba diving in an area called Alligator Reef with one other person.

Stewart’s co-diver surfaced first.

“The other diver got on board and was struggling to get on board and then fell unconscious,” said Alexandra Stewart, his sister, on Wednesday.

As the boat’s crew tended to the unconscious diver, Stewart surfaced, and, then, apparently, disappeared.

“He had surfaced and gave the OK sign, and then he was gone,” Alexandra Stewart told The Star.

Amid the chaotic scene, the crew of the boat lost sight of Stewart, a strong swimmer who became a scuba instructor when he was 18. That particular dive was Stewart’s third of the day, his sister added.

An enormous volunteer effort, co-ordinated by Stewart’s family and friends, also supplemented the Coast Guard search.

The 37-year-old Toronto filmmaker and environmental activist documented the ocean for much of his life.

He began underwater photography when he was 13, became a certified scuba-diving instructor at 18, and, as a 27-year-old, premiered Sharkwater at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Response to death of Rob Stewart

“We know Rob would want everyone to continue his mission to save the oceans and sharks,” Stewart’s parents, Sandra and Brian Stewart, said in a statement. “He believes men should live in harmony with nature.”

Mourners included Capt. Paul Watson, the infamous Canadian-born environmentalist and founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He hailed Stewart as a courageous, talented marine conservationist.

“He knew the risks involved with his work and told me once that sharks were the least of those risks,” read a post on Watson's public Facebook page Friday. “We will miss him and we intend to honour his life by working to protect and defend the sharks that he loved so much.”

Crew members from one of Sea Shepherd's vessels, the John Paul DeJoria, are travelling out to Alligator Reef to pay their respects to Stewart, according to Watson's post.

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Stewart was born and raised in Toronto, attending the all-boys Toronto Crescent School and Lawrence Park Collegiate.

After earning a bachelor’s degree of science in biology from Western University, and studying in Jamaica and Kenya, he became the chief photographer for the Canadian Wildlife Federation’s various magazines.

He left photography as a 22-year-old after an assignment in the Galapagos islands. According to his personal website, he noticed the illegal killing of sharks within the islands’ marine reserve, but couldn’t interest journalists and the public. Sharkwater became his response.

His work rallied international support for the protection of sharks as an integral form of marine life, as well as drawing attention to the cruel practice of “finning” sharks for soup stock. Municipal governments across Ontario, including Toronto and Mississauga, voted overwhelmingly in favour of banning the sale and possession of shark fin back in 2011.

“I couldn’t feel better,” Stewart told the Star at the time.

His second film, Revolution, ventured far beyond the ocean. Released in 2012, the somewhat autobiographical documentary warned that global ecological collapse is foreseeable in the relatively near future, thanks to the activities of humans.

“We’re facing a world that, by 2050, has no fish, no reefs, no rainforest, and nine billion people on a planet that already can’t sustain seven billion people,” Stewart told The Canadian Press in a 2012 interview.

Revolution represented an about-face from the motivation behind Sharkwater; it reflected a newfound belief that humans could, perhaps, improve the planet’s ecological condition.

“I never had faith in humanity,” wrote Stewart in his 2012 memoir Save the Humans. “I love animals, and I hate what humans do to them.

“That’s why I made Sharkwater. But watching people go into battle to save sharks as a result of seeing my movie has turned me around.

“I believe enlightened humanity can make a difference.”

Stewart died making his third film, Sharkwater: Extinction, slated for release this year.

A Kickstarter campaign raised over $200,000 for the 89-minute film, which, according to its official website, focuses on how sharks are used in a plethora of consumer products worldwide.

Both Sharkwater and Revolution were produced and financed by his parents, Sandra and Brian. The two are CEOs of a company which publishes magazines distributed in movie theatres. The two travelled to Florida after Stewart’s disappearance along with Stewart's sister, Alexandra, to coordinate a search-and-rescue effort.

Stewart was on the board of a variety of conservationist and shark-protection groups, as well as on NASA’s MEGA Global Initiative.

With files from Emma McIntosh