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When Jill Heinerth was a little girl, she wanted to be an astronaut. Watching the Apollo missions and Jacques Cousteau on TV with wide-eyed fascination, she was inspired by explorers pushing the realms of human understanding.
Her parents, however—in a bout of light-hearted realism—informed her that Canada didn’t have a space program, or female astronauts. But undeterred, those seeds of curiosity and dreams of achievement were planted in Jill’s psyche early on.
Her diving dreams were temporarily put on hold, but nonetheless, Jill grew up as a self-proclaimed “water-baby”. Swimming lessons turned into life-guarding, which turned into water polo, which turned into synchronized swimming, and paddling, and springboard diving. She always loved being in the water.
Out of financial necessity, however, she didn’t actually start diving until university. Her first formative dive experiences and training were in her native Canada, and as she puts it, right away, she was obsessed. The water had always been her element, so when she finally got the chance to start diving, she was all in. The first moment she got to go beneath the surface was mind blowing and she immediately knew she was meant to do it.
“It was an immediate obsession,” she remembers. “The first weekend open-water class quickly moved on to advanced class, rescue class—I think I was a Divemaster inside of a year. That’s not easy in Canada!”
As her love affair with diving took off, she was simultaneously studying visual communications and design, and after completing her bachelor of fine arts, she started an advertising and graphic design company in the Toronto area. All the while, Jill was teaching SCUBA on nights and weekends—as her hobby.
From Passion to Career
Business was booming, but she knew that she had her life turned around. “I didn’t want to be indoors,” she recalls. “I loved the creative process and the work that I was doing, but I also knew that SCUBA and being outside was way more important, so I sold everything and moved to the Cayman Islands on a whim. I wanted to figure out how I could manifest a career being creative, underwater.”
“I wanted to figure out how I could manifest a career being creative, underwater.”
Jill found work at the Cayman Diving Lodge where she learned the ins and outs of instruction while moonlighting as the resort’s advertising and marketing lead. In this role, she was composing a lot of graphics, but also had the opportunity to shoot a lot of underwater photography.
She was shooting pictures and becoming a better photographer, but during this time, she also started writing for magazines, as well. The work was addicting, and she knew she wanted to do more and more of that type of work in her career. “I realized that you have to get yourself out into the world and volunteer for things—get visible. That was my real focus in Cayman.”
Her diving (and newfound passion for cave exploration) eventually led her to Florida, where she had to largely start over. “There’s never a time when you can sit back and rest on your laurels,” she says, “You’re always trying to figure out where the next paycheck is going to come from … If you just sit back and wait—it’s not going to happen.”
“[Life and success] takes continued tenacity, and paying attention.”
A Turning Point
A turning point in Jill’s career came in 1997/98 when she got involved in a major cave diving exploration and 3D mapping project at Wakulla Springs. It was her first experience training on rebreathers and where she admittedly did most of her most audacious dives.
[The project] was a really early application of rebreathers for very long-range dives, including missions up to 22 hours long, depths of 300 feet for five hours, followed by lots of decompression. The project also achieved some very significant scientific milestones, including the production of the world’s first ever three dimensional map of an underground space.
Jill says that because the project had such a huge scientific impact and helped connect people more deeply with their aquatic resources, public perceptions of cave divers changed radically as a result. “People initially thought we were a bunch of adrenaline junkies out to get ourselves killed, but after a while we rightfully became viewed as very experienced practitioners that could collaborate with scientists and help extend the reach of their work.”
Heinerth credits this work as helping to legitimize tech diving and change perceptions. The Wakulla project wasn’t just being written about in diving magazines, but also engineering publications and digital computing magazines. All of a sudden, there was a lot more attention on technical diving outside of the context of it being a sport.
Standing on the Threshold of Discovery
Since the late ’90s, Heinerth has cultivated what she refers to as “a hybrid career,” that involves many activities that keep her in the water. Whether it’s underwater photography, cinematography, collaborating with scientists and engineers, test piloting, teaching elite tech diving courses, writing or public speaking—everything she does serves the purpose of allowing her more time in the water.
Her career exploits have taken her everywhere from inside Antarctic icebergs, to underneath the Ural Mountain in Siberia, to beneath the Sahara Desert—pretty much the extremes of the planet to do interesting work with scientists.
A prolific writer to boot, Jill recently published her critically acclaimed masterwork, Into The Planet: My Life As a Cave Diver. Written as a biography, the book chronicles Jill’s life as a cave diver while also exploring her insights and vulnerability as a human being, often exploring the crossover lessons learned throughout her career.
A central tenet and thesis of her book—one that she also stated while delivering a 2011 TED Talk, is that “We cannot allow fear to commit a hostile takeover of our bodies.”
“People think that I’m fearless,” she says, “The average layperson who hears about what I do says, ‘Oh my God, you’re so brave, you must be fearless.’ But that’s not the case at all. Fear is important, it’s a catalyst for what I do. I want to dive with people that are also afraid because we both care about the outcomes of our actions. It means we understand the risks that we are taking on.”
“But when we step toward our fears,” she continues, “that’s where we really have the opportunity to stand on the threshold of discovery and have a chance to do something that’s new for us, or perhaps even new for humanity. So, in fact, it’s fear that drives us forward.”
Along that theme, Jill hopes that people who read her book come away feeling inspired to do something that they didn’t think was possible—or have long been afraid of. In her reckoning, Into The Planet is meant to remind readers that failure is OK and that there’s no problem with stumbling from time to time. Furthermore, it’s meant to be an affirmation—one that gives people permission to be bold in their lives, but simultaneously distill and convey the sense of wonder that she’s always felt for the underwater world. “I hope that when people read it, they develop a deeper understanding of water issues and climate change, and they come away wanting to protect the planet.”
Is she done yet? Not even close. Jill’s husband sometimes asks her how much more she needs to do. “When can you stop?” he inquires, confounded by her incredible drive and energy. Her consistent retort to the gentle prodding is that she loves what she does, every day, and can’t imagine stopping.
What she does—and the way she is—is the same thing that made her husband fall in love with her in the first place. Sometimes it scares him, and sometimes it tires him out, but she’s doing exactly what she loves to do. “Any time I can be in the water, and communicating with people about this beautiful, fragile planet of ours—that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
