B (3:07)

They've got a touch of the space station about them. They're sort of long thin cylinders, maybe 10ft sort of in circumference, not quite enough to have much room in. And they're linked together. And basically at the start of any project, four teams of three divers would

A (3:20)

go into these chambers and a mixture of helium and oxygen is pumped into the chamber, pressurizing it to the depth the divers would be working at for 28 days.

B (3:30)

What it is, in essence, is just one dive. It's just a dive that takes a very long time. So basically living under that pressure for nearly a month.

A (3:38)

And for safety, there's visual communication via cameras mounted on ROVs that have eyes on the divers when they're in the water.

B (3:46)

So you're watching them on camera and everything they did looked interesting. And at that age it also looked a bit dangerous, I suppose. And absolutely they turned up on the quayside in nicer cars than I had, that's for sure. So, yeah, I decided there and then that that's what I wanted to do in my life and that gave me direction, which is often hard to find in life, isn't it?

A (4:03)

To become a saturation diver, Chris first had to work as a surface supply diver. This meant he dove with an umbilical cable connected to the surface. But he didn't live under pressure for weeks or dive as deep as saturation divers. Chris adapted well to the subaquatic world.

B (4:22)

It's like an ethereal environment. It can be very beautiful and quiet because we don't breathe gas out into the open water because it's sucked away. We're almost silent when we're down there. If there is marine life in the area, it's often not shy of you and comes to say hello and things like that. So it can be really magical. There are days when it can feel like a very, very beautiful, quiet place to work. There are days when it can be absolutely horrible. You're wading around waist deep in mud and hauling heavy things around.

A (4:47)

By September of 2012, Chris was 32 years old. He'd been diving for eight or nine years at that, but he'd only been doing saturation diving for about a year.

B (4:58)

I was probably on about my sixth entire month down there, so it certainly wasn't my first day at the office. But I was still a learner to some degree. Very much under the tutelage of Duncan Alcock, who was in the water with us that day as well. I'd done most of my saturation career with him to that point as a bit of a mentor. But away from work, I was getting married the following year. I was in the process of physically building my own house over on the west coast of Scotland. Had the hopes and dreams, I guess, that we all do at that age, of a life to be lived and kids and all that kind of thing.

A (5:31)

Chris was in kind of a sweet spot in life. He was young, engaged, and in good physical shape from cycling and swimming. And now he was doing the cool job that had fascinated him during that summer gig all those years ago. So that September, Chris left his family and went to his job at an offshore oil field in the North Sea.

B (5:52)

We were working aboard a vessel called the Bibby Topaz, which is a ship that's maybe about 300ft long with a crew of about 110 people, weighs about 10,000 tons. We were working about 90 miles east of Aberdeen in Scotland. So that's pretty much in the middle of the North Sea.

A (6:10)

Chris was on a team with two other guys, his mentor, Duncan Alcock, and another diver, David Yuasa.

B (6:17)

Dave and Duncan are very different people. Dave is a very quiet, intelligent guy, very capable of turning his emotions off and just getting on with the job. Somebody I personally got on very, very well with. We're good friends. We're quite similar in many ways. He was really good company for me. I liked spending time with Dave. Duncan was, I think, father figure probably was the best way to describe it. We'd become very close friends. We'd spend a lot of time in the preceding year working and living together, because living in the confines of those chambers, there is no privacy. You know, we are literally living cheek by jowl, sleeping within touching distance. There are no secrets. You hear every phone call home, and you see the whites of people's eyes all day, every day. So that sort of facade that we all carry as human beings, particularly as men, of course, that ego is unsustainable. It drops away and you get to know people really intimately, which is a really nice thing. It becomes a little family. So Duncan and I were very close. I think he's just the loveliest of human beings, quite frankly. An extremely professional diver. Very, very experienced. He's been doing it his whole life. So, yeah, they're very different characters, but what they had in common is they were both very good divers and both incredible human beings.

A (7:26)

Aboard the Bibby Topaz, Chris, Duncan and David climbed into a compression chamber to get ready for their 28 day shift, 24 days of work, four days of decompression. And those days of decompression, at the end, they have to be done if

B (7:41)

your mother dies, if your appendix bursts, if you break a leg or, you know, if the ship is sinking, it doesn't matter, you still have to go through those days of decompression or you

A (7:51)

can die from the bends, also known as decompression sickness. This can happen when a diver surfaces too quickly and a buildup of nitrogen bubbles is released into their bloodstream or tissues, causing severe pain and even death. Chris found his bunk and the chamber hatch closed. Then the chamber was pressurized, sort of like what happens in an airplane. But in this case, over the course of a couple hours, the pressure was gradually increased to match the depth where Chris and the men on his team would be working about 300ft beneath the north Sea.

B (8:24)

So instead of breathing air, we breathe a mixture of helium and oxygen. So the helium is very light, very easy to breathe, unfortunately gives you this very a ridiculous squeaky sort of helium voice which you have to live with for a month at a time. And trust me, the novelty of that quickly wears off. It's funny for the first five minutes, but beyond that, it's a bit of a pain, to be honest.

A (8:43)

Beyond the helium oxygen mixture, Chris and his teammates will dive in special suits to keep them warm in water that can be very cold in the North Sea around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. These are loose fitting wetsuits with warm water piped in from the ship.

B (8:59)

We heat sea water up, basically, and it's pumped down to us and floods our suit with this hot water to keep us warm in these cold conditions. And, yeah, it's very pleasant. It's a bit like being in a Jacuzzi for your six hours of work. And we put on a sort of big old diving helmet which hasn't really changed very much in the last hundred years, to be honest. It's sort of bright yellow these days and made of Kevlar, but principle's the same. You've probably seen sort of old brass things, you know, but not much has changed.

A (9:23)

The wetsuits are connected to a twisted set of cables called the umbilical, or literally a giver of life. It strung down from the ship to the diving bell and then split three ways to the divers. This is how Chris's suit stayed warm. It's also what powered the camera and light on his helmet and the comms inside his helmet so he could talk to the ship. It also piped in and sucked out the helium oxygen mixture he breathed. All this made it possible for Chris and his colleagues to work six hour shifts on the ocean floor.

B (9:55)

There are days when you're doing fairly intricate electronic and hydraulic work, or you might be welding, but there are also days when you're just hauling sandbags around the seabed for six hours and wishing you'd worked a little bit harder at school. On that particular day, we were going down to remove a section of pipework within a manifold. Now, a manifold is just a big structure, really, on the bottom of the sea, maybe 90ft long and 30ft high. A big yellow house, basically, if you want to look at it that way.

A (10:23)

On the night of September 18th, the weather was rough, with winds around 40 miles an hour and swells of about 20ft. But it's not bad enough to stop the diving operation. Once it was over the work site, the Bibi Topaz turned on its computerized positioning system to avoid using anchors. The system uses technology like GPS and beacons on the seafloor to help it stay in place. Over the divers, the ship's crew trolleys the round diving bell over the compression chamber. The bell locks onto what Chris, Duncan and David have called home for the past five days. The men get in and the diving bell is locked off. It then undocks and is trolleyed over to a hole in the bottom of the ship called a moon pool.

B (11:10)

It's about 10 o' clock at night and we are lowered down through the water column, the 275 or so feet to the bottom of the North Sea. That's a process that takes about 30 minutes or so. We can hear the noise of the. We can see the water rushing up the sides of the diving bells through our portholes as we descend. We can see a little bit of light as we go through the first few feet of our journey downwards. Lights on the vessel, the bottom of the hull and things like that. But quite quickly, we're plunged into the ethereal darkness, I guess, of the abyss of the oceans. And for us, it's very much a normal day at the office.

A (11:48)

The diving bell is full of equipment and very cramped for three adults. It's lowered to about 30ft above the seafloor to avoid damaging any P on the bottom. The men rotate who stays inside and who steps down onto the platform under the bell for this shift. Duncan stays behind to monitor the umbilicals while Dave and Chris go to Work.

B (12:10)

Duncan opens the door. That's his job as the bellman. We don our diving helmets at that point. So I pop on a diving helmet which weighs about 50 pounds. And also I'm wearing a pair of scuba tanks basically on my back which provide an emergency supply just enough to last maybe eight or nine minutes down at that dep, then plumbing my umbilical. And once Duncan has performed all his final checks, he just makes sure that nothing's leaking and checks I've got enough gas in my emergency supply. And then once he's clipped my helmet in and once that's all closed off and sealed, I can't really hear him anyway, so it's all sort of hand gestures. So he gives me a thumbs up, I give him one back and he gives me a couple of taps on my helmet just to indicate that he's happy. And I drop the last 30ft or so to the bottom. Down into darkness, into blackness, into the unknown really. And away I go.

A (13:15)

On the night of September 18, 2012, 32 year old saturation diver Chris Lemons steps out of a diving bell in the North Sea. He drops about 25ft to the ocean floor. His job to remove a section of pipe from an undersea oil production site where Chris is nearly 300ft down. It's pitch black and there are no reference points, so the first thing he needs to do is orient himself.

B (13:42)

When I hit the bottom, when I can feel it under my wellies, I ask for them to turn my light on. We have a light on our helmet to help us see. I can see the diving bell above me lit up. It has a series of lights around it so we can see it clearly. A little beacon of light above us in the darkness.

A (13:58)

Chris is carrying a compass. He waits for direction from the ship to tell him how to get to the manifold, the building with the pipe. He's supposed to work on the manifold,

B (14:08)

which is probably only 10ft or so from me. I can't actually make that out, but our dive supervisor, who is a Canadian called Craig Frederick, gives me a compass bearing so that I can set my compass and walk in that direction. And within a few steps I bump into this enormous structure that we're going to be working inside. It's painted bright yellow. And I wait for Dave. Dave comes into the water after me. It takes him a few minutes to drop down himself and come over and meet me. And then the pair of us make our way inside this manifold

A (14:41)

where Chris is working. Might as well be on the moon. It's cold Dark and inhospitable, and there's not much sound because of the rebreathing system. There are no air bubbles like a scuba diver, because sound travels well in water, Chris can sometimes hear the hum of a boat or the distant sound of drilling. Through the microphone and earpiece inside his helmet, he can talk to the other diver, Dave, and to Craig, the dive supervisor up on the boat. He can also hear the sound of his own breathing as he heads to find the pipe inside the metal building.

B (15:15)

Finding our way in is quite easy, actually. Our dive supervisor is telling us where to go. He has an engineer sat with him as well with the plans for the manifold. So he talks us into where we need to be working. We are very much just his hands, really, just to do the job. So we are given our instructions stage by stage. We start working through that process.

A (15:35)

Chris works with equipment dropped down from the boat.

B (15:39)

We bring a 2 inch hose down from the ship and drag it into the structure and start going through a pressure testing procedure to isolate pressure either side of this piece of pipeline that we're going to be removing.

A (15:51)

It's a safety test. If the pressure is lower inside the pipe than the external water pressure, the men could get sucked in. They receive instructions from Craig, repeat them back, and then get to work.

B (16:03)

Really does just feel like a normal day at the office. The diving bell is sat above us, maybe 30ft above us. I mean, we can basically see it from where we're working. Our umbilicals are running pretty straight back to it. That's always something that's very, very important to us. We need to be very careful with them at all times, make sure they don't catch on anything and they're not looped around anything.

A (16:23)

Chris and Dave are working about 30ft inside the manifold structure. They've been in the water for about an hour.

B (16:31)

Dave is working maybe six feet away from where I am. He's doing a slightly different job to me. He's starting to remove some bolts from a flange in preparation for removing the pipework. I'm going through the pressure testing work scope with Craig, so he's telling me to turn this valve and turn that valve and suddenly, though, I hear the

A (16:49)

alarms through his helmet. Chris is hearing alarms going off in dive control on the ship above him. But that's not unusual.

B (16:58)

We have this open line of communication up to the dive supervisor on the vessel 300ft above us. But that also means we can hear everything going on in the background. So that's carbon dioxide alarms, oxygen alarms. There Alarms for the vessel's positioning system, the kind of thing we hear every day that don't necessarily mean there's an emergency of any kind. They're usually just being tested or they're a trigger for the dive supervisor to do something. However, these were a little bit louder than normal, so my ears prick up a little, as do Dave's, I think, but I'm not panicking. Craig, however, very quickly lets us know that we need to put our tools down, we need to get ourselves out of the structure we're working inside, and that we need to get ourselves back to the diving belt.

A (17:41)

The tone of Craig's voice tells Chris and Dave this isn't a drill. They drop their tools and move to get out of the structure.

B (17:49)

Dave is just a few feet ahead of me. I can see his back and I can see his light shining ahead. I can also see my umbilical, which is running alongside him and out of the structure. As I'm walking out, I'm making sure that I carry that umbilical in my left hand just to make sure that it doesn't catch on any of the myriad of pipe work and valves and bolts. And so within just a few seconds, really maybe 10 seconds or so, we find ourselves on open seabed, basically.

A (18:19)

But that's when confusion sets in.

B (18:22)

I look up and I am fully expecting to see the diving bell in the sea above me, lit up, sort of beacon of home. But it's not there.

A (18:33)

Chris and Dave don't know it, but the ship's computerized positioning system has failed. It's drifting away from them and pulling the diving bell with it. Chris knows he must find the diving bell.

B (18:48)

Even though the diving bell isn't where it's supposed to be, I do always know where it is. It is easy to find because it is always, even in the worst of visibility, at the end of your umbilical. So you follow your umbilical.

A (18:59)

Chris can't see the diving bell at all, not even a faint hint of lights.

B (19:04)

All I can see is my umbilical, which should have been out in front of me going to the diving bell, but instead it is wrapped back over the top of my head and over the top of the structure that we'd been working inside, this thing that's about 30ft high. So without really thinking too much, I and so does Dave. We turn to start climbing our umbilicals.

A (19:24)

Chris and Dave start pulling themselves up hand over hand to the top of the structure, towards the diving bell, wherever it is inside the bell. Duncan takes up the slack on the umbilicals, but he can only do one at a time. He does. Dave's first.

B (19:40)

But that means as I'm climbing my umbilical, I'm leaving a loop of it behind me. And when I get to the top of this structure, this 30 foot high structure, I turn immediately to check that that loop hasn't caught on anything. And that's the moment that I realize very quickly, to be honest, that I'm in very, very serious trouble. As I've climbed, I've gone to one side of what turns out to be a transponder bucket, which is just a outcrop on the side of this structure, just on the roof. And my umbilical, unfortunately, is on the other side of that. I turn to free it, to try and stop it catching, but it happens incredibly fast.

A (20:16)

Chris's umbilical cable is snagged and it's pulling him down towards the top of the structure he'd been working inside. There's a moment when Chris worries that he'll be pulled into a gap in the structure, like being pulled through a cheese grater.

B (20:31)

Thankfully, though, and with some degree of irony, the umbilical stops slipping and it catches tight around this gap. But what that effectively means is that I've become an anchor to a vessel which is continuing to move away from my position. And because the umbilical is now caught fast, it begins to stretch.

A (20:49)

Chris starts panicking and begs for some slack in his umbilical.

B (20:53)

I'm speaking to Craig and I am asking him to give me some slack. I'm just asking for that. Screaming for it, really. I know I'm in serious, serious trouble.

A (21:01)

But neither Duncan nor Craig can do anything to help Chris. The ship and the diving bell are still drifting and they're powerless to stop it. And as the umbilical continues to stretch, the communications cable is suddenly ripped out, like a jack being pulled out of a speaker.

B (21:19)

I'm in the midst of beseeching them for more slack, and then very suddenly, I can't hear them and they can't hear me. And to suddenly have no one to speak to and no one speaking to you, it's a very lonely feeling.

A (21:31)

Chris also loses power. Then his breathing gas hose stretches and probably kinks because sud he has nothing to breathe. This is something he's trained for, though. There's a valve on the side of his helmet to switch over to the emergency gas tanks on his back. Another valve allows the used air to escape.

B (21:49)

It's a very abrupt sensation when you suddenly lose gas, almost like you're trying to suck something down and it's just not there. So that's a panicky moment, definitely. My hand goes straight to my temple and I open that supply very, very quickly. But that means I'm then on a clock. I've gone from this world where you have this infinite supply to one where you have this very finite one. But that really, that suddenly I probably only have eight or nine minutes at best of gas in the tanks on my back before I run out. And I need to get myself back to a breathable environment, which has to be the diving bell. There is no other option.

A (22:22)

As all of this is happening, Dave is also climbing his umbilical.

B (22:27)

Dave realizes there's a problem. He's in the water alongside me, and he turns to try and help me. His umbilical, though, is only 150ft long. Both of our umbilicals are only 150ft long. At this point. The vessel is already just over 150ft away from us, so his umbilical is not long enough for him to be able to get back to me. But he does get to within a couple of feet. We can't actually speak to each other at that point. My communication cable has been severed, but we definitely have an eyeball to eyeball moment where I can see the whites of his eyes. I am entreating him to help me to get me out of this situation, and he is basically looking back at me saying, I'm sorry, you're on your own, my friend. And he is then pulled away into the darkness. I lose sight of him as the vessel continues to pull him away, but I can still see the light on his helmet. And then after a few seconds, I lose sight of his light as well, and he is pulled away off the top of the structure in no small amount of danger himself.

A (23:25)

The boat keeps drifting. Chris and his snagged umbilical act like an anchor, and the tension increases. Finally, Chris's umbilical creaks. And then it snaps. Chris falls, his arms flailing out in front of him.

B (23:44)

I've fallen backwards almost instantaneously from the top of the structure. So I'm floating back down to the seabed 30ft or so below. I land a few seconds later on my back with a bit of a thump. A bit like an upturned turtle, really, with my tanks on my back, my legs sort of sticking out above me in the air. Flailing around, I try and register what's going on. A moment of disbelief it's also incredibly dark. I can't even see the shadow of my hand in front of my face. It feels very disorientating. It's hard to even tell which way is up and which way is down.

A (24:18)

Chris figures he has a better chance of being seen by the ROV or the diving bell if he gets back on top of the structure. He has no flares and no flashlight. If he heads in the wrong direction, he could walk off into no man's land. He's also keenly aware that the clock is running on his emergency tanks.

B (24:38)

It's just nothing but complete and other blackness, this enormous structure, which is probably only just 6 foot away from me and is 30ft high and painted bright yellow. But in that darkness, I have no idea. I can't even see the shadow of it. So I don't know in which direction I need to set off, but I know I need to do something. So after a few seconds, I clamber to my feet in an ungainly fashion and decide that I need to set off in a direction. I take a couple of steps and I bump straight into what I think is the metal of this structure, of the manifold. Even when I'm touching it, I can't see it. So I kind of keep one hand on it and one foot on it at the bottom and edge my way along, trying to find a way to climb up it so I can get a visual reference on where the diving bell is and make my way back to it.

A (25:24)

Chris's arm bumps into the pressure testing hose he had been using before the alarms went off. He yanks on it and realizes it will hold his weight. So he climbs hand over hand back up to the top of the structure.

B (25:37)

For some reason, I'm. I'm fully expecting to see the diving bell in front of me all lit up. I'm fully expecting to see Dave on his way back to fetch me so that we could go home, have a cup of tea, laugh about it and joke about it like we always did. But there's not a speck of light. There's nothing.

A (26:09)

Saturation diver Chris Lemons is trapped alone about 300ft beneath the stormy North Sea. His umbilical cable has snapped. The diving bell is gone and he is using up his emergency oxygen supply. He's perched on top of a metal structure at the bottom of the ocean. He does a simple math calculation.

B (26:31)

I know that I've probably got eight or nine minutes of gas in the tanks on my back. I also know that I've probably Taken four or five minutes of breathing hard, of panicking to get myself back up to that position, to climb up. But with nobody there, with no sign of Dave, no sign of the dive and bell, I realized pretty quickly that this is in all likelihood going to be the place and the time that I'm. I'm going to die.

A (26:54)

That realization has a strangely calming effect on Chris.

B (26:59)

I could almost feel the. The fear at that point draining out of me, almost pouring out through my feet, the panic subsiding, my breathing slowing down. I take steps to try and regulate my breathing, to try and conserve the gas that I have on my back for as long as possible, to try and draw it out as much as I can.

A (27:18)

Chris worries that the current might blow him off the structure, so he crawls to the center. His latex helmet seal is still secure, but the cold sea water has flooded into his suit. It's about 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

B (27:32)

I'm extremely cold. Extremely quickly. My heart rate starts to slow almost to a stop. My breathing rate slows almost to a stop. I assume a fetal position, curled up in a ball, trying to preserve heat. I'm not trying to save myself. At that point, I realize that there's nothing I can do to save myself. I'm completely at the mercy of people above me.

A (27:54)

Chris's sense of time is warped. He has no idea how long he has left.

B (28:00)

My thoughts turn to people at home, really, and they turn to the thought of the enormous personal and emotional and also logistical damage that. That what I now assume is going to be my impending death is going to cause. The unnatural order of my parents being told of their son's death before their own. I'm thinking of all the hopes and dreams that I have for the future. I'm 32 years old. I've got the hopes and dreams that we all have at that age and of a life to be well lived, of travel, of happiness, of having children, of the great things that life and our time on Earth here can bring us. And it feels as though not just that they are about to be ripped away from me, but that they're about to be ripped away from me in this ethereal, dark, alien place. How on earth have I ended up here? It seems incredible that this is going to be the place that I'm going to die.

A (28:56)

There's no countdown clock, but Chris can tell that his tanks are almost empty.

B (29:02)

I can sense the end is coming. It's getting a little bit harder to breathe, I think. I hope it doesn't hurt. Here we go.

A (29:19)

Up on the Bibby Topaz. The crew tries to wrestle the ship back under control manually, but they can't. The ship has drifted about 750ft away from Chris. The crew is nervous that the computer positioning system won't restart if they reboot it, but they try it anyway, and to everyone's great relief, it works. They know where Chris is because of the ping from a beacon he's wearing. The diving bell is still hanging about 275ft beneath the ship, with Dave on the little platform underneath. It has been more than half an hour since Chris's umbilical snapped. They move back over the site to retrieve what they think is Chris's body. Dave jumps out. The ROV has eyes on Chris and is lighting him up. Chris is lying on his side on top of the structure, bobbing a little in the current, a chunk of his ripped umbilical cable lying behind him. Dave squirts a little gas up under Chris's helmet seal. Then he clips Chris to him and climbs back up to the diving bell. It's grueling climbing with Chris, who is somewhere near 280 pounds of dead weight with all of his gear. Dave just manages to get Chris up to the diving platform where Duncan has lowered a winch. They clip it to Chris and get his head inside the diving bell. Duncan pulls Chris's helmet off. His face is bright blue. Duncan quickly gives Chris two rescue breaths.

B (30:52)

I exhale very violently, suggesting there was gas in my lungs, and basically come round straight away.

A (30:59)

It's been about half an hour since Chris has taken a breath, so it's

B (31:03)

disbelief, obviously, for Duncan. Everybody on the bridge. He starts screaming out that, you know, I'm breathing. I don't remember any of this. I'm apparently, I'm just grunting and groaning. I can remember vaguely some flashing lights and things like that. I start to regain consciousness. I start to say I'm okay. And then after just a few minutes, I actually climb up the ladder myself, back into the diving bell.

A (31:27)

Dave gets back into the diving bell. Chris doesn't remember much of these first few minutes, but it's all on camera.

B (31:35)

I sit down in my chair. I start taking my diving equipment off like nothing's happened. I then have a memory of the boy sort of reaching out and squeezing my hand and me reaching out and squeezing their hand back, so obviously aware that something has happened. I have a vague memory of seeing Dave crumpled on the other side of the bell, looking exhausted and thinking, what's wrong with you?

A (31:56)

Duncan and Dave feed Hot water slowly back into Chris's suit to raise his body temperature. It takes about 35 minutes to get winched back up to the ship. By the time the bell docks with the compression chamber, Chris is talking.

B (32:10)

I climbed down the long ladder back to the system myself. Everybody's been woken up within the chamber system. So the other nine divers, a lot of them are there waiting. They stripped me naked and they sort of hosed me down with the shower that we have in there. And they sort of very tenderly wrapped me in blankets. And they were worried I was going into shock.

A (32:27)

So the divers placed Chris in a bunk and kept him awake for observation. They took his vitals and consulted with a medic. Outside the chamber, Chris vomited a little and felt sleepy, but not much else.

B (32:39)

They looked after me, took my measurements. I was developing a bit of bruising on my inner thighs from where I'd been pulled down into the structure. Gradually, as the hours went by, I looked a bit disheveled. They put a tea cosy on my head to keep my bald head warm. I was quickly talking, laughing, joking, but ultimately the reality is I was absolutely fine.

A (32:57)

Chris was finally allowed to go to sleep. When he woke up, there was still no problem.

B (33:02)

In a strange way, I was almost expecting to go diving the next day. I was a bit naive, I think, to what had happened, to the gravity, certainly, of what had happened, and blase. And it didn't feel like a big deal at the time. It's strange.

A (33:13)

He still had to go through four days of decompression.

B (33:17)

I think that was a really good thing. It was a very cathartic process, I think, because we did indeed talk it to death. Dave and Duncan were very, very tired. They'd been through an incredible physical and emotional experience themselves, so they took a bit of time to go away and get themselves sorted while the rest of the boys looked after me. But eventually they came through and I think it was Dave in the end who actually talked me through what had taken place. I remember that being shocking, as we do in those situations. I was laughing and joking a lot, really trying to make light of it, I think probably not really understanding, I think, fully what had happened, how lucky I'd been.

A (33:53)

At first, Chris thought maybe he could keep everything quiet so he wouldn't frighten his family. But he got word that the story was going to be in the papers. So Chris called his fiance from the compression chamber.

B (34:05)

I tried to explain to her what had happened in the third person. So I sort of described the incident without relating the fact that it was me. And maybe halfway through she saw straight through me and said, you know, you're talking about yourself, aren't you?

A (34:18)

Chris tried to reach his mother, but he couldn't get through. She did read about it in the papers, and he says he's never lived that down. After he finished his decompression, doctors evaluated Chris and gave him a clean bill of health. Chris joined his colleagues for a drink at a pub in Aberdeen once he'd left the hospital. And then he did what he always does at the end of a month in a compression chamber.

B (34:49)

I usually have a craving just to sit by a fire for some reason at home, just to be at home on my own sometimes with a glass of whiskey, I will admit, and then just to be in the fresh air. And that would always be the first thing I would do every time I got out of saturation would be to lose everybody else on the boat, find the quiet space, look out to the sea normally at that point and just breathe real and fresh air and feel the cold wind on your face. You know, we went to the pub, but that was more out of duty. I think the reality is he just wanted to get in the car and go home and be away from everybody and everything and be on my own, really. Yeah. Which is possibly what I did.

A (35:27)

Chris went back to work on the same site in the North Sea with Duncan and Dave just three weeks later. He continued saturation diving for another 11 years and then worked as a dive supervisor for a couple more. It would be several years, though, before Chris fully absorbed what he had been through. He says the accident has been a very positive experience in his life, and he's humbled by how his story resonates with people. Today, Chris lives in the south of France with his family. He travels around the world giving presentations and workshops about his experience. A documentary film was made about his ordeal in 2019, and a feature film starring Woody Harrelson, Finn Cole and Simu Liu was made in 2025. Both are called Last Breath. Thanks so much to Chris Lemons for sharing his story with. Follow against the Odds on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of against the Odds ad free by joining Audible. From Audible Originals. This is Chris Lemon's deep sea diving crisis for against the Odds. To hear more stories from survivors in their own words, check out our other episodes. Fallen on Mount Whitney, Stranded in Joshua Tree, Bitten by a rattlesnake. Shark attack Survivor. Mauled by a grizzly and trapped after a car crash. Produced by Audible. I'm your host, Mike Corey. Pauly Stryker wrote and produced this episode. Sound design by Joe Richardson, engineered by Sergio Enriquez, original theme music by Scott Velasquez and 2K for freeze on Syndrome, Inc. Series produced by Emily Frost, Managing producer Desi Blaylock, senior producers Andy Herman and Austin Radklis executive producer for Audible Jenny Lauer Beckman, head of Audible Originals North America Marshall Louie Chief Content Officer, Rachel Giazza sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals.