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[pensive music playing]
[regulator hissing]
[ominous music playing]
[pensive music playing]
[regulator hissing]
[Heinerth] Cave diving is often referred to as the world's most dangerous sport.
But is it a sport?
[pensive music playing]
It's the closest thing I can think of to going to another planet.
It's this interesting yin-yang of light and dark, of beauty and danger.
Cave diving is like swimming in the veins of Mother Earth.
I'm literally swimming through water-filled passages
beneath your feet.
And these caves are like museums of natural history.
We can learn about where our drinking water is
and how we can protect it for the next generation.
[pensive music playing]
We can learn about Earth's past climate.
We can learn about ancient civilizations that have left artifacts.
We can learn about the unique animals
that live in the darkness of an underwater cave.
When you're exploring a cave,
you must solve all of your problems underground,
underwater, with no mission control to call for help.
[ominous music playing]
There are a lot of physical risks.
The silt can rain down from the ceiling.
It's also easy to get lost.
You can also get trapped.
Anything can go wrong at any time with your gear.
It's critical to know when to turn around.
I know a lot of people that didn't do that.
I swim through the graves of my friends all the time.
I've lost over a hundred friends to technical and cave diving accidents.
You really ask yourself, is this something I should be doing?
Is this fair to my family?
Do I wanna take these risks?
[regulator hissing]
But in those dark, confined spaces,
I'm happy, I'm comfortable, I'm in my element.
But I am scared.
I'm not fearless.
[thunder rumbling]
The day that I'm not afraid about what I'm doing
is the day that I should hang up my fins.
[pensive music playing]
I'm not in this for adrenaline.
I've learned so much about the plumbing of the planet,
but also about myself through cave diving.
I think cave diving is a metaphor for life.
We all have to face change and uncertainty.
[regulator hissing]
Humanity needs people that push on the edges and step into the darkness.
That's how we evolve.
Jill's been diving at the cutting edge of cave exploration for so long.
You know, she's had this stellar career of filmmaking, exploration, and adventures
with all the big names around this planet.
Jill literally wrote the book on cave diving.
She makes documentaries, she's an excellent photographer.
She's an author, she's a public speaker.
I think by 2001, she was probably...
the world's best female diver, period.
Forget "cave diver." I'm just talking about "underwater explorer."
She's there because of the excitement of exploration,
the satisfaction of curiosity.
Jill always...
I guess she needed to see what was around the next corner.
She was always very curious.
I could easily say that she was an explorer from the beginning,
and same as she is now.
[pensive music playing]
[Jang] Our parents always took us out on hikes.
The Bruce Trail was a big thing that we enjoyed.
[Heinerth] I loved hiking the trails, but even more,
I loved climbing down into those cracks and crevices
and looking around
in this three-dimensional, below-ground space.
Those were my first experiences in caving,
and often those were cozy, comfortable, small places.
We had a set of National Geographics
that were gifted from my grandmother and grandfather.
From the light of a bare bulb,
I would go through these volumes, page by page.
Those pages showed me what was possible for me in the future
and inspired me to study and learn
and create a future where I could be an explorer, too.
[alarm ringing]
[intriguing music playing]
[radio static on TV]
[man on TV] Launch commit. Lift off.
We have lift off with Apollo 14.
[Heinerth] You know, back in the day, astronauts were heroes,
pushing the envelope of human physiology.
Just the scale, the magnitude, all that technology.
[astronaut speaking indistinctly over radio]
[Heinerth] It was like you were looking through this peephole in history,
seeing something so incredible.
I knew I had a burning desire to be an explorer.
I was so excited and thrilled.
I ran home and couldn't wait to tell my mom about the experience,
the thing that I had just seen.
You know, "Mom, I wanna be an astronaut. I'm gonna be an astronaut."
And then when she told me no, it was like,
"Oh, like, am I not good enough? Am I not capable? Like, what is it?"
She's like, "No, there's no space program for Canadians.
There's no women astronauts.
It's, like, there's no place for you there."
And it was discouraging.
I thought, "Well, what can I do? How can I be an explorer?"
[pensive music playing]
Watching and seeing Jacques Cousteau on TV was that pivot point, really.
Here he was sailing around the world to fantastic places
and then going underwater with this wild-looking technology.
Breathing underwater,
and then encountering, like, sharks and fish and whales.
[whales cooing]
And that captivated me.
And I thought, "If I can't explore outer space,
if I can't be an astronaut,
maybe I can explore inner space
and the magical depths of the ocean instead."
My first real cave diving expedition was the Huautla expedition in 1995.
[dramatic music playing]
Huautla is situated in the Sierra Mazateca Mountains,
and there's a cave system inside the mountain.
So if you peel away the face of that mountain
and you look inside,
you've got, like, this whole network of tunnels and spaces.
And if you enter a hole in the top of the mountain,
you might be descending down on rope
or climbing down a waterfall deeper and deeper into the earth.
And the year before we got there,
that's how the explorers were getting into the system.
So when I went in 1995 with that very same team,
we decided to work from the bottom up.
We were seeing the pieces of this puzzle come together,
and one of the biggest unknowns was this resurgence.
If we could dive in through that,
come up into air-filled passage,
maybe we could just connect those two together,
and at that time we would have ended up with roughly the world's deepest cave.
[Heinerth] The expedition got harder and harder in a series of stages.
I mean, just getting there was tough in the car,
and we were exhausted after four days of driving and car repairs
and getting up into the mountains
to an altitude where the car could barely drive up the incline.
And it was hot, and there were bugs,
and the winds were so strong
that they would blow away your tents if you weren't in them.
But then we experienced mudslides.
The rainy season came a bit early.
That shallow streamway between base camp and the cave opening
would periodically be just filled with this rush,
a tsunami of water down the canyon.
It felt like the physical hardships were, at times, just too much to bear,
and that was even before we went into the cave to go diving or surveying.
We didn't have enough burros and people to carry everything we needed,
so the first and easiest choice was,
"Leave Jill's diving gear on top of the mountain.
She's not gonna use it.
She's gonna have to do other things during the project."
So Paul and Noel ended up doing all of the exploration diving.
I got involved in supporting the base camp
and surveying dry cave, and doing other things.
But as the dives progressed and we reached some real physical hurdles,
Noel got to the point where he said,
"I've done everything that I can do, and I've reached my psychological limit."
Noel was an experienced cave diver, cave explorer, and a physician.
He was our expedition doctor.
And at that point, either Paul could dive solo,
or there would be no more diving, and we'd just dry cave explore,
or, in that split second, I had a chance to say, "I wanna do it."
And that's what I did.
I said, "Hey, I could fit Noel's gear.
We don't even have to go get my dive gear. I can wear Noel's diving gear.
I'd like to have an opportunity to explore this cave."
-And I remember Bill's look like, "Really? -[pensive music playing]
What makes you think that you've got the chops to pull off this dive
when Noel says it's too much and he feels it's not safe to go on?
Why are you convinced that you're not gonna die in there,
and I'm gonna have to carry your body out of this canyon back up
and explain to your family what happened?"
Because just a year earlier in the very same spot,
one of their teammates had died.
And it was a friend, a dear friend,
and they had to carry his body, something that took 12 days.
That pall hung over that expedition, and it informed everything that we did.
And I thought, "Whoa, that didn't take long."
This is business.
This is really serious.
This is not just some fun lark on a travel destination.
This is life and death.
What I wasn't sure of when that conversation happened
was the level of her discipline, you know?
Was she the one that was gonna get to 68 meters depth and panic,
you know, and take Paul down with her?
This is not some Boy Scout badge
that you put on your arm and use to be some status symbol, you know?
This is deadly shit.
You go in there, and there is a finite chance
that you are going to die if you don't do things just right.
If you have somebody who's just gung ho without considering the consequences,
that was what I was looking for.
Was this somebody who's just,
"I wanna make a name for myself by getting in here
and pushing this to some spectacular limit"?
[clears throat] Or is it somebody who says,
"You know what, the goal here is to get data
and not get anybody hurt"?
And by the time the sun came up, Bill said, "I'll support you.
I'll help carry your gear.
I'll get you there and do whatever you need to do.
I'm willing to give you a chance."
And that changed my life.
[tense music playing]
On the biggest dive, we needed everybody's help.
The river was swollen
between the base camp and the opening of the cave,
and it was very dangerous,
even to transport all the gear, the tanks and everything to begin the dive.
And then as Paul and I got ourselves prepared,
got all our tanks organized,
the moment that it was time to go, the water started to rise.
Dirty water started to flood into the cave,
and the current turned to reverse.
We had a split second to make a decision to go or no go.
And I looked at Paul, and he said, "Dive, dive, dive,"
and disappeared under the surface.
In that moment, I remember thinking to myself,
"Are you an explorer or not?"
And I went for it.
And I dove underwater,
racing against that flowing current of dirty water
that was running into the cave system,
and swam as fast as I could to keep up to Paul.
It's like the die was cast, and I was on autopilot.
It was happening.
[dramatic music playing]
[regulator hissing]
So we surface in this pool
with a waterfall cascading down on top of us.
But at this point, in order to continue on,
we needed to climb up over the waterfall, get our gear up there, and continue.
[Stone] I mean, it's as close to, you know, Jules Verne as you're gonna get.
The rest of the world disappears, and you are an explorer.
Once we'd gone through that whole ordeal and gotten into that upper pool
and continued into the water that was clear...
I thought, "Okay, this is it.
This is the edge of the unknown. I am touching the void and going forward."
My heart is racing.
There's no map, so you're gonna make it.
[music intensifies]
[regulator hissing]
When I look back on that dive into the deep passages,
we ended up too deep for the traditional breathing gases.
The sounds in my mind were, "Ooh, turn around, turn around."
It was that distance pressure.
"Whoa, we're a long way from home."
And when those nerves start to creep in, it's really time to go.
[suspenseful music playing]
You have to be willing
to get within a hair's breadth of complete success,
but also know when to turn around.
When I got out of the dive and I reached the surface,
the first thing that I saw was Bill Stone crouched by the side of the water,
like a mother hen, and he looked down, he's like, "Oh, thank God."
We have three rules on any expedition that I organize.
One is that nobody gets hurt.
Second one is everybody has a memorable time.
And the third one is you come home with new data,
as much as you can get safely, right?
And so if you take all three of those, we hit them all.
What they stopped at, at 600 meters in and 68 meters deep,
was a gigantic underwater tunnel carrying this subterranean river.
So that remains an open question,
and nobody has been back to continue that work.
So it's still out there.
When I first met Jill, I thought that she had skills.
They were undemonstrated to me.
So it was somewhat of a gamble taking her on that trip.
And, you know, the end result is she kicked ass and did a great job,
and was good at focusing on getting the information that we needed,
the data that had to come out of there
so that we could think about, "All right, how do we plan a return?"
So to me that showed that she had, you know, the right stuff, you know,
the astronaut quality that we seek
when we're talking about people doing this kind of stuff.
[Heinerth] Working with Bill Stone in 1995 gave me an opportunity to explore
what we thought could be the world's deepest vertical cave system.
So in 1996, I turned my attention
to what we thought would be the longest cave system in the world.
[pensive music playing]
[Kakuk] Jill's forte has always been as a coordinator,
getting the right people in the right places.
She played a big part in that,
as well as going out there and making discoveries on her own.
She wanted to be more involved in cave diving.
She wanted to be more involved in discovery.
She knew what her future was gonna be.
There wasn't anything gonna stop her from getting there.
[Heinerth] It was very affirming
to finally push the envelope and be leading instead of following.
I began to recognize
how important my viewpoint from inside the plumbing of the planet
could be to the rest of humanity.
I can see the influences of what we're doing on the surface of the Earth.
We're in the middle of Mexico
in an area where people are having trouble finding clean water to drink,
and yet they're living on top of a prolific water source
that if they just knew exactly how to access it,
it could change their lives.
If I can help people not just understand where their water is,
but how they are affecting it,
then maybe we have a chance at solving some of these issues
like water scarcity and global climate change.
[regulator hissing]
By the time we wrapped the expedition,
we pulled together all the maps and discovered
that we had mapped 56 kilometers of new passageways
and found the world's longest cave system.
That was incredible to me. I was on cloud nine.
And it was like the possibilities were now open to me.
We started to think about how to make a better map.
And that's when Bill Stone proposed our next great challenge.
He wanted to bring together an international expedition
and make the world's first accurate three-dimensional map
of any subterranean space, dry or wet.
And it seemed like a bit of a crazy proposal at first,
but I thought, "I am in."
So from that point forward,
we started putting all of our efforts into planning for this project
called the Wakulla 2 Project.
If you had asked any respectable exploring cave diver
in the United States in those days
about what would be the greatest spring
and the greatest challenge in cave diving,
they would've instantly said Wakulla Springs.
[dramatic music playing]
Everybody knew it. It was just gigantic, in those days, air clear.
The sand funnel alone coming in from this 100-meter diameter basin
was pristine white sand kept clean by this aquifer.
It was like going to another planet.
[Heinerth] Wakulla Springs is very deep, and it gets deep fast.
So the first thing you do is you get down to that maximum depth,
and that's about as high as the Statue of Liberty, 90 meters.
But then we're going in this overhead environment
where you cannot come up.
There's no way out.
You're going in over three kilometers.
But even when you're out to the doorway of the cave,
you've still got 17 hours of decompression ahead of you
before you're back safely on the surface.
It would take thousands of scuba tanks to do the dives that we did at Wakulla.
We need a completely different technology called a rebreather.
[Stone] A rebreather is a self-contained diving backpack
that recycles your exhaled breath.
It pulls out the carbon dioxide that you create, it adds oxygen,
and allows you to just keep recycling quietly for a very long time.
You can end up with between 100 and 200 times the efficiency
in terms of your dive capability over the old traditional scuba.
[Heinerth] Basically, you're asking a diver
to manipulate their life support environment.
And that could be
one of the most dangerous things they've ever done.
Too much oxygen, and you can have a seizure.
Too little oxygen, and you can pass out.
The wrong gas choices can cost you your life.
And there's a lot that can go wrong
with a complex piece of electronic equipment
when you submerge it underwater.
But I was so excited by this new technology
and what it could enable me to do as an explorer.
I could go further or deeper than I'd ever been before.
And that's the beauty of that gear.
The most important part of the Wakulla project to me
was the fact that the perception of cave divers
was changing because of this project.
For the first time in history,
we could show people exactly where water lay beneath their feet,
and how they could be affecting the health of that water supply beneath their feet.
Cave divers were now respected as valued citizen scientists.
[Kakuk] One of the things that we did at Wakulla was we were trying to condense
what other teams had done over 10 years into a three-month period
with an international group who hadn't dived together before.
So that's a huge undertaking.
And so trying to get people to jell as a team
who have completely different disciplines because of the environments they dive in,
that's a really tough, tough thing to do.
People didn't just go into the cave with all that gear.
This massive support team of 160 people would line up behind two people,
and those guys, they were astronauts as far as I'm concerned.
You know, when you saw the kit-up procedure,
there were two people per person
helping these people get all their gear on because you can't do it yourself.
It's just too much stuff.
[Kakuk] I looked like a giant rebreather with two little legs sticking out.
You can't even see my head behind it.
Uh, it was not fun to dive.
It's serious back aches, things like that.
And we didn't have the timeline to get it dialed in
as well as we could have.
[breathing heavily]
[pensive music playing]
[Heinerth] To me, the entire project felt like a moonshot.
Everything about that project,
from the life support to the mapping device
to the way that we handled the decompression,
was all sort of borrowed from concepts in space.
In fact, at one point, Bill even reached out to NASA astronauts,
and their remark was,
"What you guys do is way more dangerous than what we ever did as astronauts
because we had mission control.
You leave that entrance of the cave and you go inside, and you're on your own.
That's way harder."
[dramatic music playing]
When we got past that point of the previous world record,
we tied on a guideline
and we broke into new exploration, and we kept on going.
And that was a huge victory for me,
but it was also a world record
for any woman going deeper and further into a cave in history.
I realized I was on the cutting edge. I was there. I was doing it.
And I had realized my goals of being an explorer.
[Stone] Nobody had ever worked in that regime underwater,
and so Jill was one of those pioneers.
It was evident that she was the lead.
She was the only female on that dive team,
and she led the whole exploration of B Tunnel,
which was arguably the most difficult of all the options that we had looked at.
Um, you know, so she really rose, in my opinion,
to superstar status on that project.
[pensive music playing]
We produced a 3D map of Wakulla Springs.
We mapped 32 kilometers of tunnels.
Highly accurate, highly detailed.
You could see the features of the cave going through
in a way that you never could if you were doing it on a dive
because you simply couldn't see it.
[Heinerth] I think when I started down the road of the Wakulla project,
I wasn't as confident in myself, in my abilities.
I learned a lot over those years just preparing for the project.
But by the time I left that project, I felt like I had leadership
and confidence to move forward and take on the next challenging task.
[McClellan] Jill has, like, 7500 logged dives.
Well, you know, that 7501 might be the one
where, you know, a 25-cent O-ring fails and she's too far back,
or a rebreather fails.
I liken it to maybe someone who's married to a police officer or a firefighter.
You know, they go off to their job, and it's inherently dangerous.
It's inherently-- It has some risks.
But I also know that Jill
does everything she can to minimize those risks,
and she's very clear about communicating that to me.
And that just kind of, you know, takes a little bit of the edge off for me.
But yeah, I worry. I do worry.
I'm sure that what I do
contributes to anxiety and difficulty for him,
and that's hard.
But I also know that if I quit doing what I love,
then I'm not gonna be the woman that he fell in love with.
So there's this weird, delicate dance that we play,
and there are times when it gets acute.
I would say that cave diving is probably more dangerous
than what I was doing in the military.
I mean, I was deployed overseas.
I was involved in skirmishes and things like that.
I know which end of the rifle the round comes out of.
But I did not go to as many memorials or funerals in 15 years in the military
as I did in my first few years of being married to Jill.
[somber music playing]
There are very few divers in the world that are as experienced as Jill.
But sometimes she dives with scientists and other people who--
Diving is just sort of a side thing that they have to do.
And, you know, one of the rules in diving is you have to be able to save yourself,
but you also have to be able to rescue your buddy.
So I'm often very concerned about who that buddy is.
Like, is that person gonna be capable of bringing Jill out of a cave?
[pensive music playing]
[regulator hissing]
[Heinerth] I was working with a young scientist
who needed to get a critical bacterial sample
from inside a kind of gnarly, small cave.
And I had done plenty of dives in this cave, and she hadn't.
In fact, we hadn't even dived together before.
More often than not, I work with different scientists,
extending the eyes and hands into this remote environment.
[tense music playing]
[regulator hissing]
These aren't necessarily linear passages where you go in and you come out.
It's like swimming into the branches of a braided tree,
and then you have to find your way back out.
In cave diving, we always have a guideline,
which is a thin, usually nylon line that we place in the cave like a pathway.
It is vital to our safety
because it's a visual reference to the exit.
[regulator hissing]
[Heinerth] When I called the dive, when she had the samples that she needed,
and she turned to leave...
she got stuck.
[suspenseful music playing]
And I realized that she was panicking.
All of a sudden, her fins were kicking,
and in this narrow space, what that meant was a complete silt-out.
I grabbed onto her with one hand
and onto the guideline with the other hand,
and I felt her wriggling and fighting against being stuck.
[woman grunts]
[music intensifies]
[grunting]
And I'm holding onto the guideline and holding onto her,
and they're separating and getting farther and farther apart,
and then suddenly, the guideline breaks,
and I'm holding the bitter end of our safety line in my hand.
The part that leads me out of the cave is gone, and I can't see.
[tense music playing]
And for a moment, my heart was racing, my respirations were going up,
and I'm thinking these crazy thoughts.
And at some point, I lost track of her.
I didn't know whether she'd left the cave, whether she'd gone further into the cave.
I had no idea.
[suspenseful music playing]
And I got out my safety spool and tied in to the bitter end of that line
to begin searching for the other end that I could tie into.
And I realized I couldn't just run out of the cave.
I needed to go further in.
When we pass through a cave, even with perfect technique,
we'll disturb the visibility a little bit.
But when you reach that clear water, you know nobody's been there.
[tense music playing]
So once I went further into the cave,
and I confirmed that she hadn't passed me and kept on going,
then I could work my way slowly out and, like, clear the cave, basically.
Search every corner and every side passage to ensure I wasn't leaving her behind.
[regulator hissing]
And then my regulator packed it in.
With all the digging and moving and patching guideline,
it was so packed with clay that the valve was basically jammed open,
and the only way I could access that gas supply is to turn the tank on,
take a breath, and turn it off.
[regulator clicking]
So I searched and found a side passage
where all of her scientific gear was laying on the floor of the cave.
When cave divers panic and the end is near,
a lot of people start shedding equipment,
tearing their mask off, throwing down any extras,
sprinting for the exit.
And I was fairly certain that I would find her next.
[suspenseful music playing]
And when I finally reached the exit...
there she was in the doorway.
She had surfaced and done the right thing.
She had called 911.
She had called the cave rescue team to come out
and gone back in the water to wait for me.
But when I came out of that cave, it was 73 minutes after her.
After an experience like that,
people tell you all the things they wish they had said
if they wouldn't have had the chance to say them.
They write you e-mails and notes,
and I recognized that I was reading my own eulogy.
That's pretty hard to take,
for me, for her, and for Robert.
I think what really hit me was when she told me
that sort of the SOS went out,
and all these cave divers and rescue people
were on their way to rescue her, or--
I know what cave diving's about, so they weren't gonna rescue her.
They were just gonna bring her body back.
[somber music playing]
That was the first time in our relationship
that I really thought to myself,
"What am I gonna do without Jill in my life?"
I mean, we had just created this great life for ourselves,
and I don't know what I would do if that piece was missing.
So I became very resentful towards the whole idea of cave diving.
I don't think I became resentful to her personally,
but just the whole idea.
And yeah, there were tears at our house that night, me and her.
We had a real heart-to-heart,
and she explained to me how she needed to do this.
You know, it would-- This may be just-- This may seem trivial,
but it would be like asking Tiger Woods to stop golfing, you know?
That's not gonna happen.
But this was more than just a sport to her.
This was a calling.
How do you keep engaging in a sport, an activity where your friends go to die?
[pensive music playing]
I've been to so many funerals
and written quite a number of eulogies over the years.
And I'm sure some people wonder
how I could ever go back to a place where a friend of mine died,
or where I even brought a body out of the cave.
Technical diving means that a lot of people have rebreathers
and stage bottles and high-speed scooters that take them kilometers
to faraway places that would have been world records a decade ago.
It's not the gear that kills people,
it's people that get themselves killed
by the decisions they make before they go in the water.
I have to look at risk every day and ask myself, "Is it worth it?"
I could lose my life doing this.
[regulator hissing]
The point in my life that truly shattered my sense of invincibility
happened in 2000
when I was exploring a place called The Pit in the Yucatan Peninsula.
[tense music playing]
A few years earlier, Paul and I had found these deep tunnels
that were connected to this giant cenote sinkhole.
The Pit was unique because of the depth.
In fact, it's as deep as the Great Pyramid is tall.
All the caves in the Yucatan were far less than 100 meters deep.
So this could be a whole new level of exploration.
And it might even attach the two longest caves in the world.
At the time, I had thousands of log dives under my belt,
and I had just been inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame.
And that was a big deal for me.
So I headed off with a great deal of confidence on that expedition.
At the time Jill was exploring in The Pit, it was an entirely different world.
Everything was really remote.
Divers had to hike way back out into the forest
to even access the dive site.
So there's a lot of risks involved in doing this type of dive
because if something goes wrong,
you don't have a fast and easy support network.
This is a dive that at the time
probably not a lot of people were really qualified to do.
[ominous music playing]
[tense music playing]
[Heinerth] When you first put your face in and you look down,
it's like you're in a giant witch's cauldron.
Deep below you is this hazy, foggy layer with tree branches sticking up out of it.
And that layer is caused by rotting vegetation,
causing a chemical called hydrogen sulfide.
When you actually descend through the hydrogen sulfide,
all of your senses are just assaulted with this rotten egg smell
that somehow gets past your scuba mask, and even makes your eyes tear up.
But it was below the hydrogen sulfide,
deep into this witch's cauldron, where the magic was.
[foreboding music playing]
There was nothing like this in the Yucatan,
and we knew that we had found something pretty remarkable.
I'll admit, it's a complete rush
when you are breaking into the unknown
and exploring a place that nobody's ever been before.
It's enticing,
and there's definitely something that's always drawing you forward.
[regulator hissing]
We'd made it to 120 meters, and we were at the back of a really large room.
But ahead of us was a small restriction.
Now, continuing on might have netted a connection
to bring together the two longest cave systems in the world.
But we were really deep, and we'd been down for an hour,
so I knew it was time to turn around.
Every minute longer that we stayed there
was gonna start to net a lot more decompression and a lot more risk.
[Gibb] So the deeper you go and the longer you stand in water,
the more nitrogen you get into your system.
You can't go straight up to the surface
without having that nitrogen form bubbles in your system.
This can be avoided through a series of stops as we ascend.
That will reduce the chances of decompression sickness.
However, there is no way to guarantee
that a diver will 100 percent not get bent on a dive.
[ominous music playing]
[music intensifies]
[Heinerth] Where we had to decompress was a massive opening,
you know, the size of a football stadium.
When I got to the point about 20 meters deep,
hours into the dive, I felt something odd happening.
[tense music playing]
The first symptom was this sense of impending doom.
I knew something was very wrong.
I sensed this odd sensation in my thighs first.
It felt like there were ants crawling all over my legs inside my suit.
And then it dawned on me.
It's not bugs. This is decompression sickness.
I'm bent. Those were bubbles.
Absolute bubbles inside my body, ripping apart tissues, causing pain.
I knew I needed to stay underwater as long as possible
to let the effects of the pressure maybe push those back into my body.
But it was already too late.
I started to feel pain from my neck to my wrists to my ankles.
I was hurting, aching everywhere.
[breathing rapidly]
Paul was actually swimming laps around the sinkhole at this point
because he was cold.
I expected him to sort of step in and take over,
but I think he felt powerless to help me.
I felt so alone.
This explosion of thoughts were just competing in my head.
What's happening? Am I going to get worse? Am I going to be paralyzed?
Am I gonna die?
What about my career? I don't know what to do.
It was so confusing and the anxiety was just, like, filling my brain.
[disembodied voices] You're gonna die. Your career's over. You fucked up.
You aren't good enough. You should quit. You'll be left in the dive shop.
What are you going to do now? People will think you screwed up.
What the fuck were you thinking? You've wasted your life.
Your career's over. Stay out of it.
[suspenseful music playing]
[music intensifies]
[Heinerth] By the time I got to the surface of the water, I thought,
"Oof, I'll just take off my gear, and I'll climb the ladder,
and everything's gonna be okay."
But it wasn't.
With every rung of that ladder,
my body felt heavier, I felt more pain,
and the whole emotional sensation of what was going on
was just starting to come to light.
By the time I got to the top,
I literally just rolled off into the dirt and crawled over into the jungle
just to lay down on my sleeping mat.
But as I looked down at my biceps and my thighs, they were swollen.
I mean, like, I looked like Popeye swollen in my biceps,
and there were these, like, weird, mottled,
like, ribbons of bruising turning up on all over my body.
It was really, really scary.
[tense music playing]
What would this mean? Would I recover from this?
Was this the end of my career?
And eventually, I laid there and I thought,
I can't walk out of the jungle right now.
I'm gonna have to treat myself here.
So, the next morning, I spent hours in the water,
breathing pure oxygen, down to about 15 meters,
which, in a normal situation, could throw someone into a seizure.
But I knew that was the best medicine for what had happened to me.
By the time I got to the surface of the water,
I called out to the highway to the dive shop that was helping us out.
People hiked in and walked me out.
I was in agony and exhausted.
I could barely walk 10 steps to just collapse and lie down.
When I finally got to Playa del Carmen to get treatment,
what I needed was time in a recompression chamber.
So a recompression chamber is usually at a hospital facility.
Basically, it's a room that can be pressurized.
The patient gets put inside the chamber,
the doors close behind them,
and then the environment inside there is pressurized with air.
And once they're at that pressure,
then we give them 100 percent oxygen to breathe.
And oxygen under pressure at those depths
has a couple of really important mechanisms.
The first is just to provide oxygen into the patient's body
to help flush out the inert gas, the nitrogen.
There's a second and equally important effect is that
oxygen under high pressure like that is actually an anti-inflammatory.
It has an effect almost like steroids
to quell the body's inflammatory response to this attack by the bubbles.
-[ominous music playing] -[machine hissing]
There was a whole week of treatments and consulting with the doctor.
And at the end of that week, he only had three words for me.
And they're the worst three words I've ever heard.
"Never dive again."
[somber music playing]
When I was told "never dive again,"
my heart sank.
I don't even know what my identity was,
how I would move forward in my friendships, relationships, career.
So much was tied to that.
The impact of being told by a doctor in Mexico that you'll never dive again.
I mean, that is massive for someone like Jill.
It would be massive if that happened to me.
You know, you're suddenly facing an existential crisis, really.
You know, your whole life has been torn in half
by telling you that you can't do the one thing that defines you
and makes you happy and gives you an income as well.
So, you know, that's a really, that's a big moment for her.
[Heinerth] After getting bent, that caused me to reflect on
whether I really wanted to do this anymore.
I realized that there wasn't a single scenario
that I could look at for a quote-unquote "normal life"
that was gonna satisfy me.
I couldn't envision a life without diving.
And it made me reflect on what were my motivations in the beginning.
When I graduated from university, I went right into working in graphic design.
That meant at times that I'm sitting at my drafting table trying to meet a deadline,
and I don't leave the office for three days
over the Christmas holidays.
I'm there all night working, and I'm never leaving work.
And in my mind, I'm going like, "You're gonna kill yourself by the time you're 30
if you keep up this pace."
I was teaching scuba, but it was a hobby.
It was what I did on nights and weekends.
I was constantly daydreaming about diving
and envisioning that turquoise beauty.
And in the long Canadian winter, that's what my mind and my soul needed.
[pensive music playing]
[tense music playing]
With every day that passed, that office felt smaller,
and the walls were closing in and the ceiling's descending on me,
until the point where I felt trapped.
That's claustrophobia for me.
But I have to say, it's those societal pressures and familial pressures
were the hardest to navigate as a young woman.
"What are you doing? You're gonna be a scuba diver?
You're doing what? You're throwing it all away?
How do you make money? Your biological clock is ticking.
You gotta move on. You gotta get married. You gotta settle down.
It's time to stop this childish, playful stuff."
[dramatic music playing]
I got to the point where it was clear to me
I could not go on living the way I was doing,
working the way I was working.
I needed to be my own full authentic self.
When I moved to the Cayman Islands,
I did some of my first real cave dives and my first real cave exploration.
[regulator hissing]
[pensive music playing]
Every day was just an opportunity to go around the next corner.
To get a little bit further away from the entrance.
To see that next thing.
And that newness, the freshness was just so invigorating to me.
I learned a lot about the psychological development of a cave diver
and how fear is an important part of what I do.
But I realized that fear and facing it
is something I learned about before I even started cave diving.
In my third year of university,
four other women and I found a house
in the Lawrence West neighborhood in Toronto
that we could rent for the school year, and we'd each take a bedroom.
And the first night I slept in that house, I slept there alone.
And in the middle of the night, I heard something.
[glass breaking]
[tense music playing]
And then I realized, "Oh, my God, there's a burglar in my house.
If I just hide here, he won't notice me."
Downstairs, I could hear footsteps.
-I could hear drawers opening. -[drawer opens]
-I heard his feet start up the stairs. -[footsteps approaching]
And I thought, "How can I get help?"
I don't have a phone.
And that's when I knew that I needed to find a weapon.
I was gonna have to defend myself.
And click, I would see a minute pass,
and then I would hear him coming up the stairs again.
[footsteps approaching]
And he came closer.
[footsteps continue approaching]
And it felt like an eternity waiting for that door to open.
[panting]
And then suddenly, it's like an eruption.
Vroom! The door flew open. He almost ripped it out.
And then he came after me.
And in that moment,
it's kill or be killed.
I thought he was going to rape me or kill me or--
I didn't know what was gonna happen but I just knew
that something awful was gonna happen
and I needed to find every bit of strength that I had.
And as terrified as I was,
and shaking and barely able to contain myself,
I reached out, and I slashed with the knife across his chest
and ripped his shirt open and tore into his flesh.
And I watched the blood soak through his shirt.
I was staring into the face of impossible.
I don't know how I'm going to get through this.
[panting]
It took me so long to process what had happened.
And at first, it was just all the victimization
and the terror and just the violation
of somebody in my space and coming after me like that.
I would wake up in the middle of night in a cold sweat,
and I was already fighting that burglar in my dreams.
I remember sitting with Kim, my roommate,
and I was probably complaining
and telling her the same story
that she'd heard over and over and over again.
I was processing these feelings with someone
who I really respected and cared deeply about,
and then she turned to me and said, "When are you gonna get over this?
What are you gonna do about it?"
And I thought, "What?"
Like, where are the hugs and love?
And I guess for her, you know, it was time for tough love.
It was time to shake me out of it.
If I couldn't get past that moment in my life,
it was gonna define everything moving forward.
And I needed to find something in that experience
that I could use that would help me to grow.
Without that near-death experience,
I may well have not dealt with some of my other near-death experiences
in cave diving as well.
It definitely defined the direction of my life.
[pensive music playing]
It definitely gave me the courage
to move forward and do things that I thought were impossible.
After getting bent, my doctor told me
he knew I was gonna start to tread back into that water one step at a time
to decide whether I was gonna be diving again.
Ultimately, as the symptoms faded
and my confidence started to return,
I knew that I was going back to diving.
But it was gonna be a slow progression.
It was like dipping the toe in the water.
My first swim gave me anxiety.
My first dive I did on 100 percent oxygen
because there's no way you can get bent on 100 percent oxygen in shallow water.
It was a slow progression, a transition back to doing what I loved.
And I suppose as I started to feel a little bit better
and my energy was restored,
so was my defiance and my stubbornness.
And there was this little voice growing in the back of my head, "Just watch me."
I was working on television projects with Wes Skiles
when we both decided we wanted to do a full-length feature,
a documentary film.
The work that I do in communicating about how
cave divers can be citizen scientists
and contribute to a better understanding of the world,
I got that from Wes.
When he started cave diving, it was with the intention to take pictures underwater.
He really set the whole genre into motion and inspired a lot of people.
Both Wes and I really wanted to go to Antarctica.
[pensive music playing]
I just wanted the experience of going to this part of the planet
that I'd never seen before.
And when you grow up in Canada, you're interested in the polar regions.
And at first, we thought,
"Well, maybe we'll follow in the historic path of Ernest Shackleton."
But we were also watching these satellite images
because these cracks were developing in the Ross Ice Shelf down in Antarctica,
and scientists were kind of interested in what was happening.
When the B-15 iceberg calved away from Antarctica
and I realized there was actually more of a story,
that was a big draw for me.
And we pitched to National Geographic that we were gonna go to Antarctica
and be the first people to ever go cave diving inside an iceberg.
But not just any iceberg.
The largest moving object on our planet.
The biggest iceberg to ever calve away from the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica.
To get up there in front of this moving iceberg the size of Connecticut
and say, "We're gonna go under there and see what there is."
I mean, that even in and of itself,
you're talking about water that's minus 3C,
you know, probably around 27 degrees Fahrenheit.
And you go down there,
and even with the best dry suit, within 40 minutes,
your hands are becoming dysfunctional.
You know, and these guys were going for way longer than that.
[dramatic music playing]
[Heinerth] Most tourists that go to Antarctica today,
they have about 24 hours of uncomfortable seas
going from South America to the Antarctic Peninsula.
But where we were going,
we left from New Zealand and made a 12-day crossing
of the most violent seas on the planet.
We had 20-meter waves.
We had the boat icing so heavily that it was starting to list.
We had to get out on deck
and smash the ice off the boat with baseball bats and hammers.
And I was seasick.
I was seasick for 12 days.
Even going to the bathroom was dangerous.
The wave hit the boat and I was literally launched out of that tub,
against the wall,
and cut and bruised and damaged.
So, I didn't even know if we were gonna get there.
[tense music playing]
After 12 days of torture, we finally made it to Antarctica.
It was like I'd landed on another planet.
Diving in Antarctica and going inside an iceberg,
I would say that that's definitely the most challenging dive of my life.
There's so many risks that we faced.
I mean, the wildlife itself, leopard seals or orcas,
there are so many uncertainties there.
The cold water, it's as cold as it can possibly be.
There's nobody to call for help down there.
We don't have a recompression chamber,
so if somebody gets bent, there's no way to treat them.
The US Coast Guard actually told us we were on our own.
About a month into our time in Antarctica, Paul and I finally found
what we thought was the cave
that would let us deliver what we had promised to National Geographic.
[pensive music playing]
We got to a place where we could swim underneath the iceberg.
And the seafloor's on the bottom, and there's this arch of ice over my head.
And it was beautiful.
There was a carpet of life all over the seafloor,
just voraciously feeding in the current.
Meanwhile, I'm hearing creaks and cracks and thuds and retorts
and all kinds of sounds
that I could not only hear,
but I could feel them in the sternum, in my chest.
Paul and I, at one point, had returned to where we'd gone into the iceberg,
and the doorway was blocked with broken ice.
So, Paul and I just start swimming around and under all these blocks,
and some of them are sort of moving and shifting.
And when I finally swam through these chunks and I got to the surface,
Wes is hanging over the boat and his face was so animated.
And he's like, "What happened? We thought you were dead.
When the ice wall just sort of broke away, it created this huge wave
and it almost threw us out of the boat.
And then we realized where you had gone in, it was blocked."
We had no idea the stress that everybody topside had experienced.
[tense music playing]
I often look at expeditions,
and I realize there's a mounting pressure that happens as the project moves on.
You start taking risks,
and it's to get the goods, it's to get the job done.
It's because of the pressures from everybody around you.
Wes hadn't even been inside the cave yet.
And we needed to show it to him,
to photograph what we needed for our movie.
[pensive music playing]
We descended down that crack and went underneath the iceberg.
We were filming all these beautiful filter-feeding organisms,
and the dive was going perfectly well.
And then I felt the current picking up,
and getting faster and faster, and it had literally turned now,
and it was sweeping us into the iceberg.
-And I thought, "Ooh, this is bad." -[suspenseful music playing]
But simultaneously, I also had a leak in my glove,
and my hand was soaking wet.
And I had put up with that as long as I possibly could.
Between the current and the pain in my hand,
I turned to the guys and I called the dive.
It's time to go.
We turned around to try and escape through this tunnel.
The current was getting too strong.
We dug our hands into this doughy seafloor,
like throwing up these wispy silk piles
and displacing these animals as we tried to pull ourselves along.
I'm fighting for my life, and I hear Wes yell,
"Help me with the camera!"
I'm like, "Are you kidding me?
Fuck the camera. We've got to get out of here."
I was doing everything I could to survive at that point,
and I was leading the other two out of the cave.
Well, Paul drifted back to help Wes, and I'm thinking, "I'm pissed.
Equipment is not worth it. Let's get out of here."
[music intensifies]
Finally we get to the point where we're at the bottom of this crevice,
and we need to go up.
But the current is pressing me down and back into the cave.
And I suddenly realized that these little ice fish I'd been observing
had created burrows in the ice,
and I might be able to use those burrows to stick my fingers in
and climb the ice wall.
And I thought, "Uh-huh, you guys are pretty cool,
but I need those holes."
And I started using my finger
and pressing them into the holes of the ice-fish burrows,
and using those like a climber would to climb the ice wall.
And Wes and Paul copied and followed,
and we finally got up to the point
where we now had a decompression obligation over our heads,
and we had to stay in this freezing cold water,
turning a one-hour dive into a three-hour ordeal.
[dramatic music playing]
When I finally swam back to that boat,
I remember the chief scientist looking down on me.
And I'm holding on to the ladder and I'm looking up at Greg on the boat and I said,
"The cave tried to keep us today."
And it was true.
I think that's as close as I've ever felt to death.
We put our gear aside and went to have dinner.
And then I heard screams on the deck.
I thought, "What's going on?"
And we ran up on deck and Wes grabbed the camera,
and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
[dramatic music playing]
That cave I'd just been inside of and just narrowly escaped was no more.
[tense music playing]
After seeing that whole iceberg collapse,
and really even after just going to Antarctica,
I felt so small,
but I also felt the majesty and wonder of Mother Nature
and the fragility.
And I wanted to communicate to people about climate change
and water issues and beauty and wonder.
And when I shared my adventures,
I was gonna shove a little truth in there too.
And hopefully teach people about
how magical this planet is,
and how we can protect it
if we all take care of our square foot
and make good choices about the next step forward.
I still ask myself this whole question about what is my legacy.
What am I doing?
Why am I doing this?
And today, I think my ultimate goal is to be the woman that I wish I had met
when I was 10 years old.
[indistinct chatter]
[pensive music playing]
It's been my greatest honor
to come home and resettle myself back in Canada,
and go into the school system and talk to kids about exploration and discovery.
Education and outreach are critical to what I do
and it gives me a sense of purpose.
I really hope that my work will inspire young girls to know
that anything is possible,
anything they want to do,
despite the social, cultural, or familial barriers
that they might be facing.
Anything is possible when we put our minds to it.
If I can give people hope and optimism, I will have done my job.
[dramatic music playing]
I've never lost sight of wanting to be an astronaut.
It's been really exciting for me to work with technologies underwater
that are now destined for space.
[dramatic music playing]
I'll be diving in one way or another for the rest of my life.
I feel like an earthbound astronaut.
I want people to really think about fear
and how that directs our lives,
how it can stifle us,
and how we can miss out.
[music intensifies]
If we don't face it and embrace it,
we're gonna run from it for our whole lives.
Without exploration and discovery, we are dead.
We will not progress as a society.
So the only answer is to face it...
and step into it.
Face the fear.
Step into the darkness.
Let your eyes adjust,
and then do something new for yourself and for humanity.
[pensive music playing]
[regulator hissing]
[pensive music playing]