Lifestyle

This woman is addicted to one of the world’s riskiest jobs

Jill Heinerth was wriggling through a narrow crack in the underwater cave when claustrophobia caught hold of her dive partner.

The January 2011 dive was her first with Ruth, a twentysomething marine biologist who had hired Heinerth to guide her as she collected samples from the cave’s walls. But the panic attack transformed their simple excursion in a Florida county park into a life-or-death struggle.

In her hysteria, Ruth thrashed wildly, kicking up a blinding veil of thick silt and snapping the thin lifeline that should have guided the pair to safety. Then she shot off into the murk.

At that moment, Heinerth’s status as one of the world’s most celebrated cave divers, and her decades of experience swimming deep into the earth’s crust from the Yucatan to the poles, meant little.

“Underwater caves offer up a deceptively easy way to die,” she writes in “Into the Planet” (Ecco), out now. That day, Heinerth could have depleted her air tank with frightened panting, wedged herself in the 14-inch-high passage, blundered deeper into the pitch-black cavern or brought on decompression sickness with a too-fast ascent.

More people die while diving in caves than trying to summit Mount Everest.
For more than 25 years Jill Heinerth has worked as a cave diver — a riskier pursuit than mountain climbing.

She groped through the gloom for the broken end of the guide line and tied her emergency reel to it. “The next team that swam into this cave might be coming to retrieve my remains,” she thought. “I wanted to be sure they had a line to get out.”

For more than an hour Heinerth sipped tiny breaths from her tank and searched for an escape by feel. Finally the water settled enough for her to see that she was only 15 feet below the surface — and within sight of her weeping partner, who had already made it out. “For 73 minutes, I had been dead to my friends,” she writes. “An eternity of waiting, suffering and reflection.”

Cave diving, which kills about 20 people a year, is perhaps the world’s most dangerous sport. More adventurers have died swimming in caves than summiting Mount Everest.

But diving has a primal pull for Heinerth, 54. “When we are deep inside these caves, we are more alive than at any other point in our lives,” she told The Post.

Jill Heinerth
Jill Heinerth

Underwater caves remain one of the planet’s last frontiers of discovery, fueling her work as an independent explorer and filmmaker for PBS, the BBC, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and others.

“For me, there is an inner drive to explore,” Heinerth said. “I’ve never been content to stay in one spot.”

Heinerth grew up in Toronto in an outdoorsy family that encouraged her love of nature. At 27, feeling stifled by her job as a graphic designer, she left Canada to become a scuba instructor at a Caribbean resort. Soon after, she met Paul Heinerth, an established cave diver who became her first husband and helped launch her career.

On one of her riskiest adventures, in 2001, she led a team to Antarctica to prove that caves can form within icebergs, an expedition sponsored by National Geographic.

Inside the ice, she found an isolated ecosystem thriving in the darkness. Above, a domed ceiling in every shade of blue; below, “a spectacular carpet of living creatures in vivid warm colors” — sponges, isopods, crabs and more.

Then the tidal flow within the cavern unexpectedly reversed, making the dive a battle for survival.

“With the current pressing down on us, we needed to climb the walls,” she writes. The slick ice offered no handholds, only finger-width burrows where tiny ice fish hid. “I jammed an index finger into one of the hollows. An ice fish slithered out.” She dragged herself up and out, one fingertip at a time.

“The cave tried to keep us today,” she gasped when she emerged into the frigid air.

Hours later, the iceberg — weakened by the fissures she had just discovered — shattered and sank.

Into the Planet Book Cover

“The whole thing exploded,” she remembered. “And at the time, standing on the deck, all I could think was ‘Oh no, I needed to do one more dive!’ ”

“Many times, our families don’t understand why we take these chances,” Heinerth added.

That includes her husband, Robert McClellan, a VA nurse and Navy veteran — but not a cave diver. The two have been together since 2006, shortly after Jill and Paul Heinerth divorced. Heinerth has no children.

Her career “scares him,” she said. “But he understands that what I do is what makes me the person he fell in love with.”

And she plans to keep on doing it.

“I have a friend who was cave diving at 83. That is my role model,” she said.

“I’ve got to be underwater. I’ve got to be wet.”