Stuff Meets… cave diver, explorer, writer and filmmaker Jill Heinerth

According to filmmaker James Cameron, “More people have walked on the moon than have been to some of the places Jill Heinerth has gone right here on earth.” Indeed, as one of the world’s best underwater explorers, Jill regularly goes to places where no one has gone before and is constantly pushing herself in the extreme world of underwater cave exploration. In this interview she talks about what motivates her, managing the risks, her love of technology and more…

More people have been to the moon than some of the places I’ve dived.

There’s a lot of times when I’m exploring a cave that nobody’s ever been there and probably nobody will ever return to that place, so I recognise that the data, the images, the stories that I bring out from these remote places are really important and I need to share them with the world. 

I recognise that I’m doing something that’s very risky.

In all frankness I’ve lost more than a hundred friends to cave and technical diving accidents. So, that is at the front of my mind, and I don’t really get an adrenaline rush like some people might expect. I’m interested in the new, I’m interested in the data, I’m interested in the images and trying to capture these unique places, so I’m really in that creative mindset. I am an artist actually – that’s my original training at university, so I’m really locked into that artistic sensibility, looking at what’s around me and trying to capture It.

My husband gets a veto.

I feel like the risks have to be worth it. Our sense of risk evolves through our life as we gain wisdom and experience, but also as we gain deep, personal connections. So, obviously, my partner, my husband – my choices affect him directly, so I have to be really careful about the choices I make and the places I decide to go – I give him a veto. I give him veto power to say I’m really not comfortable with that team or that destination.  

It’s hard to put a dividing line between work and play.

My husband always jokes: My god, does everything have to be an expedition, even going to the grocery store! It doesn’t feel like work – I would do it regardless and I sort of pinch myself every day for finding a way to fulfil this dream as an underwater explorer. 

Exploring Wakulla Springs, Florida in the late 1990s was a turning point. 

I was working with the United States Deep Caving Team and this was a project for me that took two or three years of my life to plan and train and prepare for and a lot of things that unfolded weren’t exactly how I planned or expected – I actually didn’t expect to be one of the lead expeditionary divers on the end of the line. I had a 22-hour dive mission on that project that was just absolutely incredible and at that point I was told no woman had ever gone as far into deep caves and I thought oh wow, that’s really cool.

We use something that’s more akin to a spacesuit than traditional diving gear. 

We are wearing a rebreather, we’re recirculating the gas that we’ve used, so we are scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the mix, adding little bits of oxygen from whatever we’ve metabolised – it’s complex. 

Diving Into the Darkness tells my life story. 

This is a documentary film about my life, which is a little humbling to even say. I’m so excited because I worked really closely with the director, Nays Baghai, and shared all my archives with him and then we did reenactments around the world to bring some of the stories to life. It’s a beautiful film, I’m so proud of it – it’ll leave you on the edge of your seat but also has a wonderful message.

As a kid growing up in the ’60s, I was told the age of exploration was over. 

We’d climbed the highest mountains, we’d been to the moon, we’d been to the deepest trench of the ocean – what was there left to do? And yet I wanted to be an explorer. I recognised pretty early in life that, in order to increase my range in exploration, especially underwater, and to do new things, it would require technology. It was technology that would let me go further into a cave, using those rebreathers and diving computers, survey devices, cameras and things like that. So, I knew this would be what drove me forward and very early on I embraced the new life support technologies and I started to work with scientists interested in other cutting edge devices. 

I’ve used Sunnto gear since I was a Girl Guide.

As a young diver, when I brought my first equipment, I had a Suunto compass in my gear and even before that, I had a little Suunto handheld compass when I was a Girl Guide. It was a brand that was familiar to me and actually back on that 22 hour dive, I was actually informally testing a Suunto watch in those days – pairing it with a heart rate monitor. I didn’t have an official relationship with Sunnto but over the years that turned into an ambassador role; now I have a little bit of a say in helping to drive the direction they would go in for the kind of tools we need.

Home is a fun place to be. 

We’ve got the best Apple computers – I’ve spent more than I could wish to count-up on Macs. Basically we’ve got a little broadcast studio setup and my husband has a little sound studio setup and we have a little living room and one bedroom. It’s a tiny little condo in an old grain mill, on a waterfall. 

My hobbies are analogue. 

I love cycling, I love reading, I love drawing. It’s a balance between digital things and analogue things in a way – I have to break away from the digital. 

The ocean features a lot in my art. 

I need a lot of field notes for the research I’m doing, and so I’m always sketching and drawing the animals I see in the caves. And as I survey a cave, I’ll also hand-draw cross-sections of it and things like that. 

Find out more about Jill’s work here and watch the trailer for Diving Into the Darkness here.