And you take a few very quick deep breaths in order to knock back the cold. When you first jump into the water you get an immediate "bang" - assault like an ice cream headache from the water hitting your face. Wes and the first mate stayed in the boat, and Paul and I rolled off into slushy, chunky water. When we decided to do our first dive inside an iceberg, it was really exciting. But what we didn't understand, really, was the environment we were going to put ourselves into in these iceberg caves. I was familiar with all of the issues that could happen to our gear because of the ultra-cold water, the additional risks from ice diving. We were all very experienced cave explorers. "We were in this environment that nobody had seen before," Jill Heinerth says. And then, when we rushed him back to the Braveheart, we had to strip him down and get him into a bunk with sleeping bags to warm up, because he had already been in the water too long. We had the first mate tugging on him and Paul and I trying to push him. He’s wearing, basically, a bag full of water. I mean you very, very quickly lose the ability to manipulate your hands or operate or even think straight.īy the time he'd shot a minute of footage, he was almost incapacitated. He decided he wanted to shoot one minute of footage so he could see what this new camera would produce. Wes rolled off the boat, the water started pouring into his suit, and he should have gotten out of the water immediately. We picked this beautiful iceberg that we called "Patience Camp," and we pulled our Zodiac boat into this little bay. This was the coldest dive either of them had ever been on. I wasn't nervous for myself as much as I was for Wes and for Paul, because this was their first ice dive. The first dive, I was actually a little nervous. And I had the sense that I was looking at something that would never be the same again. The moment I saw this white pinnacle of ice for the first time, standing like a mountain on the ocean, my heart was racing. We figured that, if this great crack had broken this piece off the ice sheet, then there had to be other cracks. When we pitched our project to National Geographic, they said, "Wow, there's caves inside of icebergs?" And we said, "Hell yeah, there are caves inside of icebergs!" But the truth was, we didn't know. So we decided that we were going to go to Antarctica and be the first people to ever cave dive inside an iceberg. We had been watching satellite photos of this great crack slowly opening up in the Ross Ice Shelf, and as we were getting close to making our pitch, the largest moving object on our planet broke away from Antarctica. My partner and I wanted to pitch a project to go to Antarctica. ![]() I look into a cave and I want to know what's around the next corner. ![]() People look into caves, and they see nothing but darkness, terror, fear, claustrophobia. She’s done work for PBS, National Geographic and the BBC, and she’s one of the most accomplished cave divers on the planet.īack in 2001, accompanied by expert diver Paul Heinerth and underwater cinematographer Wes Skiles, Jill Heinerth captained an expedition to the B-15 Iceberg in Antarctica. Jill Heinerth is a professional cave diving explorer and underwater filmmaker. This story was re-broadcast on Septemas part of The Best Of Only A Game. Facebook Email Jill Heinerth and her team decided they would become the first-ever to cave dive inside an iceberg after B-15, an iceberg 'the size of Jamaica,' broke away from Antarctica.
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