The Essentials of Cave Diving: Jill Heinerth's Guide to Cave Diving

by Jill Heinerth

Cave diving has been called the "most dangerous participatory sport" in the world. It doesn't have to be. With proper training, experience, and guidance, you can be a skilled cave diver, and enjoy this challenging and rewarding activity, for a lifetime. With decades of technical diving experience, including world record cave dives, and paradigm changing underwater exploration, Woman Divers Hall of Fame member Jill Heinerth, has created this full-color contemporary guidebook. Generously illustrated, "The Essentials of Cave Diving" contains practical, 21st century underwater knowledge, including sidemount techniques and the latest rebreather technology. Encompassing all levels of cave diving, from entry-level to expert, this manual is an essential tool; appropriate and relevant to all cave training disciplines.

Genres: Nonfiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published September 8, 2015

About the author

A pioneering underwater explorer, Jill Heinerth has dived deeper into caves than any woman in history. Selected for the inaugural class of the Women Divers Hall of Fame, her recent awards include the Wyland Icon and Scuba Diving Magazine’s Sea Hero of the Year.

Recognizing a lifetime of contributions to advancing underwater exploration, in 2013, Heinerth was presented with the Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration by the Royal Canadian Geographic Society. The author of several books about diving, Heinerth currently has two titles on Amazon.com’s extreme sports “Top 100” bestseller charts. She is an active filmmaker, author, a regular Diver Magazine columnist and a highly regarded technical diving instructor.

Her company, Heinerth Productions, Inc., specializes in independent publishing, new media content creation, and underwater videography. Heinerth’s professional credentials include PADI CCR Trimix Instructor Trainer in addition to teaching for several rebreather and cave-diving agencies.

Reviews

[Scot Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book presents an overview of modern cave diving, both on open circuit and closed circuit. Heinerth covers gear, training, styles, safety, cave geology and biology, and advanced topics such as CCR cave diving, DPVs in caves, and cave surveying. If cave diving interests you, give this book a go.

[Rolands Jegorovs · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice accompanying book when doing a cave or caverns diving courses. Otherwise I see it being useful for me as a refresher of ideas to think about.

I love to go in depth for topics discussed in the book but for that you would need to refer to perhaps NOAA Diving Manual.

I love that the book talks about incidents and what are the most common ones, discusses skills to practice (I’ll likely start incorporating some additional ones while diving in Latvia like line work), the health aspect and what to look out for, practices for diving in teams. If you have something already about these topics it’s not necessary to get this book I’d say but if you like a condensed physical reference material on your shelf, could get it. :)

Also, I enjoyed the parts about gas planning for teams with various conditions with included formulas and examples.

For now I skipped the chapters on CCR cave diving and scientific dive preparation chapters as those are far from what I do.

I appreciate the authors intent behind the book.

[Chitranshu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good refresher for beginners divers

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Info

Excellent information. The kindle version could you use some format fixes as the left margin cuts off a lot of words.