{"id":206,"date":"2012-04-23T17:47:53","date_gmt":"2012-04-23T21:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofwater.org\/?p=206"},"modified":"2012-04-23T17:47:53","modified_gmt":"2012-04-23T21:47:53","slug":"jill-heinerth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofwater.org\/2012\/2012\/04\/23\/jill-heinerth\/","title":{"rendered":"Jill Heinerth: Underwater Explorer and Water Activist"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

<\/p>

Jill Heinerth<\/p><\/div>\n

When she was 2 years old, Jill Heinerth fell off a dock into the freezing cold water of Lake Ontario.<\/p>\n

In the midst of drowning, Heinerth said the only thing she remembers is floating face down, content and unafraid.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was peaceful down there,\u201d she said. \u201cI saw the rainbow ripples on the sand below and just didn\u2019t want to get out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ever since that moment, Heinerth, now 47, said she sees life as a continuing effort to get back in the water.<\/p>\n

As a professional cave diver and independent filmmaker living in High Springs, Heinerth has explored about 100 underwater caves all over the world. She has made movies for National Geographic<\/a>, befriended a cave diving pioneer and guided \u201cTitanic\u201d director James Cameron on his first cave dive.<\/p>\n

Growing up in Ontario, Heinerth\u2019s parents never let her take diving lessons. She didn\u2019t learn to dive until she enrolled in a scuba class in college. The teacher took the class on a dive trip to a lake in Ontario.<\/p>\n

The water was 37 degrees and murky. She couldn\u2019t see more than a few feet in front of her. But within hours, she stumbled upon four tugboat wrecks in the depths of the lake.<\/p>\n

That was it. Heinerth was hooked.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe noise of the world completely stops when your down there,\u201d she said. \u201cIt is very freeing. I just knew it was where I belonged.\u201d<\/p>\n

After she finished college, Heinerth opened an advertising agency in Ontario. Life in an office, however, didn\u2019t suit her.<\/p>\n

At 26, she sold her business and most of her belongings, packed a suitcase and moved to the Cayman Islands where she worked in marketing for a hotel and taught diving.<\/p>\n

It was during those two-and-a-half years in the Cayman Islands that Heinerth began making trips to High Springs, Fla., a small town in North Florida painted with exotic, fresh-water springs, to explore its numerous underwater caves. The town was an international mecca for cave diving.<\/p>\n

In 1996, she left the Cayman Islands and moved to a city a few hours south of High Springs.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople don\u2019t realize it, but the springs here are like the eighth wonder of the world,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve explored a lot of caves, but these springs are the most unique on the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heinerth now lives in High Springs with her husband Robert and their peacock, Indigo. She dives in Ginnie Springs across from her house almost every day.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that she\u2019s looking for something in particular when she plunges into the deep, Heinerth said. She craves the experience, and if she comes across a boat wreck hidden in the sand or finds herself swimming alongside a killer whale, it\u2019s an added bonus.<\/p>\n

As her love of diving developed, so did her passion to raise awareness about water and the issues associated with it.<\/p>\n

When she relocated to Florida, she opened Heinerth Productions<\/a>, a film production company that she still runs today. This way, the diving was still constant, but she could now capture what she saw and share it with the world.<\/p>\n

A brush with death \u2014 and taxes<\/h4>\n

In 1996, Heinerth was working on a film about the caves of Wakulla Springs near Tallahassee. It was on that project that she met Wes Skiles, a cave diving pioneer known around the world for his underwater photography<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The two decided to work together and explore underwater caves in an iceberg that had calved off Antarctica in 2003.<\/p>\n

Skiles, a daring diver and Heinerth, an eager explorer pitched the idea to National Geographic<\/a> on a whim and got the funding.<\/p>\n

It took them a month of diving in the minus-two-degree water before they found any caves.<\/p>\n

At one point, while she was exploring the caves beneath the iceberg, the current unexpectedly changed. The rope that divers use as a lifeline from the caves to the surface broke. Heinerth couldn\u2019t see more than five feet in front of her.<\/p>\n

Her ear piece went silent. She lost contact with her team.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t think I was going to make it,\u201d Heinerth said. \u201cI just kept thinking to myself, \u2018Crap, Robert doesn\u2019t know how to do the taxes. I\u2019ve got to get out of here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But she calmed herself and made it out. It was one of her scariest brushes with death, but she went back down the next day.<\/p>\n

Exposing the world of water<\/h4>\n

Heinerth\u2019s proudest piece of work was a documentary series she and Skiles shot in the mid-2000s called \u201cWater\u2019s Journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two divers who shared a passion for film making wanted to spread awareness about where tap water came from and the importance of conserving water. They followed the course a drop of water takes through the environment, traveling through storm water and sewer systems and exploring the entire extent of the Everglades watershed.<\/p>\n

Tragedy struck in 2010 when Skiles died <\/a>while diving off Boynton Beach in Florida. Although she misses her friend and mentor, Heinerth hasn\u2019t let Skiles\u2019 death keep her from combing underwater caves.<\/p>\n

She went on to work with Hollywood director James Cameron on his 2011 film, \u201cSanctum.\u201d The film is dedicated to Skiles.<\/p>\n

Because she had made dozens of films and worked frequently with National Geographic, Heinerth made a name for herself in the diving world.<\/p>\n

Cameron contacted her to help train the actors and direct underwater scenes in “Sanctum,” a film about cave divers who explore one of the world’s most treacherous and least accessible caves.<\/p>\n

Under Heinerth’s guidance, Cameron went on his first-ever cave dive in Ginnie Springs.<\/p>\n

In her home, Heinerth has pictures of her and the Academy Award-winning director eating pizza while they float in the aquamarine water.<\/p>\n

Next May, Heinerth will head on the road to present and promote her newest film, \u201cWe Are Water<\/a>,\u201d to educate viewers about where water comes from and to teach people how to protect and nurture our connection with the finite resource.<\/p>\n

Heinerth and her husband, Robert, will bike more than 5,000 miles from Vancouver to the southernmost point of the St. Johns River, stopping in cities to present the film. The tour is an effort to engage viewers in taking action to conserve water.<\/p>\n

\u201cI see \u2018We are Water\u2019 as the journey of the rest of my life,\u201d Heinerth said. \u201cI\u2019m going to continue to carry this message in every way that I possibly can.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When she was 2 years old, Jill Heinerth fell off a dock into the freezing cold water of Lake Ontario. In the midst of drowning, Heinerth said the only thing she remembers is floating face down, content and unafraid. \u201cIt was peaceful down there,\u201d she said. \u201cI saw the rainbow ripples on the sand below […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[29,63,66,113,141,153],"coauthors":[158],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-people","tag-cave-diving","tag-high-springs","tag-jill-heinerth","tag-scuba-diving","tag-underwater-filmmaking","tag-wes-skiles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofwater.org\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofwater.org\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofwater.org\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofwater.org\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofwater.org\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofwater.org\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofwater.org\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofwater.org\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofwater.org\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofwater.org\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofwater.org\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}