14-03-2025
‘I was left for dead 90m below the North Sea'
'There wasn't a speck of light,' says diver Chris Lemons of the time he faced death 90m below the surface of the North Sea. 'I knew I didn't have much air left. I curled up into the foetal position. The fear pretty much drained out of me and was overtaken by grief. I was getting married, I was building a house. You have the hopes and the dreams of a life well lived, and that was about to be ripped away. I always think we're ten years old inside, just masquerading as adults, and I almost felt like I regressed back to that. I couldn't put my thumb in my mouth because there was a helmet there, but I wasn't far away.'
His extraordinary story is now a movie, Last Breath. We speak the morning after he's been to the New York premiere, partying till the small hours with the film's star Woody Harrelson ('lovely, easy-going, just as you imagine he'll be.') Harrelson plays Duncan Allcock, one of Lemons's dive partners on that fateful day: Lemons himself, tall and bald, is played by Peaky Blinders' Finn Cole. 'He's a good-looking guy with curly hair, so an obvious fit.'
Lemons was a saturation ('sat') diver, part of a little-known elite who repair and maintain oil and gas apparatus deep below the ocean surface. To avoid repeated decompression procedures ascending from depth, as would be necessary with scuba equipment, sat divers spend 28 days in a pressurised chamber attached to a support vessel, and from there go up and down in teams of three to work on the seabed. This means they have to decompress only once, for five days, at the end of their stay. Where normal air divers are limited to depths of 50 metres, sat divers can go to more than 10 times that: the name refers to their tissues being saturated with the inert components of their breathing gas.
Commercial saturation diving dates back to 1965, when divers went 60m below the surface of the Smith Mountain Dam in Virginia to repair debris screens. The same year, legendary French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau conducted the Conshelf III experiment, with six divers living 100m below the Mediterranean Sea for three weeks. The growth of maritime oil extraction in the 1970s brought with it commensurate demand for sat divers, particularly in the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico.
Living conditions are spartan and intensely claustrophobic. On some jobs, divers can spend more than a month underwater with up to five other men, taking it in turns to work six hour shifts, 24 hours a day. Most diving chambers consist of an entranceway (which also doubles as a toilet and shower area), a small living quarters and a sleeping area stacked with double bunk beds. The total floor size isn't much bigger than a London bus. Divers spend their days working, sleeping and eating the 6,000 calories they need a day to fuel their labour. (Tastebuds, though, are dulled by gases in the chamber – hot sauce is a typical luxury.)
The early years of saturation diving were marked by repeated accidents: in the North Sea alone, 15 divers were killed in seven separate incidents between 1974 and 1983. In the US, the Center for Disease Prevention and Control estimates that occupational fatality rate for sat divers is more than 40 times the national average for other professions. As safety procedures improved, however, accidents have became much scarcer. An entire infrastructure grew up around the divers – more than 100 people crew a dive support vessel, though there may only be half a dozen actual divers.
Lemons himself had started out as a crew member on such vessels, and had instantly been drawn to the divers. 'They seemed a bit of an enigma, a bit heroic and a bit special. What they did seemed very romantic and interesting. Also, they used to turn up on the quayside with nicer cars than I did' – divers can earn nearly £1000 a day.
He'd been a sat diver for two years when his own accident happened. 18 th September 2012: 'a normal day at the office, as much as any day can be in that slightly alien environment.' Lemons, then 32, was working a routine six-hour seabed shift in the Huntington oilfield, 115 miles east of Aberdeen. A diving bell took him, Allcock and Dave Yuasa (played by Simu Liu in the film) down from the Bibby Topaz support vessel. Up top, the wind was around 35 knots and the swell five metres, still just about within diving limits: down below, visibility was good (with no natural light that deep, 'visibility' refers to mud and silt in the water).
Lemons and Yuasa were conducting pressure tests before removing a section of pipework from within a house-sized structure known as a manifold. Allcock was bellman, staying in the bell to manage the others' umbilicals – candy canes of cords wound together which supplied heliox (a helium/oxygen mix), hot water to keep their suits warm, light for their head torches, and radio communications with the surface. 'Umbilicals are exactly what they sound like,' Lemons says. 'Givers of life.'
He and Yuasa heard an alarm, which was itself no cause for concern: safety systems are regularly tested 'so you hear them quite often, along with people slagging off divers, saying how much better they were in their day'. Only when Craig Frederick, dive supervisor on the Bibby Topaz, ordered them back to the bell did they realise something had gone wrong. 'The tone of his voice told us this wasn't a drill. But there was still no real panic at that stage.'
The alarm had come from the Bibby Topaz' dynamic positioning (DP) system, designed to keep the boat on station even in heavy weather. A system malfunction meant that the Bibby Topaz had begun to drift, dragging the divers with it. As Lemons started to work his way back towards the bell, his 50m umbilical caught on one of the manifold's metallic outcrops. 'I dived back down to try and free it, but I knew right away I was in serious trouble. I'd basically become anchor to an 8,000-ton vessel, and there was only going to be one winner.'
As he struggled, he realised that he was going to get pulled through a small gap in the manifold 'like being in a cheese grater' unless he managed to free the umbilical from the outcrop or detach himself from it: but the latter was impossible, unless the umbilical itself broke.
Which is exactly what happened.
Back in the bell, Allcock saw Lemons's entire umbilical rack being pulled from the wall, but was helpless to stop it. The cables snapped one by one – light gone, comms gone, heat gone, air gone – and suddenly Lemons was alone in the pitch black, untethered in every way.
He turned on his emergency supply of air, which would last about five minutes, and tried to find his way back to the bell, doing his best to quash rising panic and fear. 'I had a gauge on, but I couldn't see it. That was probably a good thing. It would have been a countdown clock, which would have increased my breathing rate. I remember talking, pleading [that someone would] appear out of the darkness to rescue me. I remember getting upset and thinking, 'Why me? Why am I here in this horrible darkness?' It seemed ridiculous. For all you know life is finite, you still want to get as much as possible of it. I was overwhelmed with desperation, sadness, loneliness and disbelief that I was going to end my days in this strange and alien place and not in my bed aged 90. There was an incredibly small window of time to process everything.'
Once he realised hope was lost, however, he became calm, accepting of his fate: and at some stage, probably around nine or ten minutes after the umbilical was broken, he lost consciousness. Meanwhile, the crew on the Bibby Topaz were frantically trying to reset the DP system and find their way back to their original position above the manifold, away from which they'd drifted almost 250m. In the bell with Yuasa, who'd made it back safely, Allcock was 'praying as hard as I could, and I'm not a religious person at all'.
It was almost half an hour before the Bibby Topaz, system now reset, got back in position: long enough for Yuasa to be convinced this was now a recovery rather than a rescue mission. 'I didn't expect him to be alive.' He found Lemons motionless on the manifold and got him back to the bell, where Allcock took his helmet off, saw that he'd 'gone as blue as a pair of denim jeans,' and administered artificial respiration.
Incredibly, Lemons regained consciousness in short order: a bark of a first breath which Allcock described as 'like New Year, crackers, fireworks, you name it'. The coldness of the water, the amount of inert gas already in Lemons's system – his blood effectively working like an emergency reservoir – and the shallowness of his breathing while unconscious had between them created a perfect storm of survival. (Similarly, some people have survived immersion in freezing water for more than an hour.) Nonetheless, Lemons's recovery was greeted with incredulous relief by the 110 people on the Bibby Topaz who'd seen monitor footage of his motionless body on the manifold and feared the worst.
He was back diving within three weeks. He rationalised that the incident had been a freak accident 'and the chances of it happening again [were] infinitesimally small.' For a long time he considered it just 'a bit of a scrape', and admits that 'it took years to recognise the enormity of it.' Indeed, it was only when a documentary (also called Last Breath) was made in 2019, seven years after the accident, that he realised how many people present that day had been affected by it, and how badly: some have never worked with divers since.
But the lure of being in such a unique and unusual environment is clearly enticing. 'There are days when you feel slightly weightless, you get to see the beautiful sea life when it's lovely and peaceful, and it feels magical, ethereal, special, and romantic,' he says. 'There are also days when you're dragging sandbags through mud for six hours thinking, 'I should have worked harder at school.''
The demands of decompression mean that it takes longer to ascend 90m from the seabed than it does to traverse the 380,000 kilometres back from the moon. If the comparison with astronauts is not entirely accurate – 'unlike us, they have to be smart enough to tie their own shoelaces' – the psychological demands of being cooped up in a confined space for a prolonged period are very similar. 'You need to be easy to get on with,' says Lemons, who, affable and self-deprecatingly funny, clearly is just that. 'There's no exit mechanism, even if your appendix bursts, your mother dies or you just don't want to be in there anymore.'
He gets many emails every week, divided into three main categories: divers who've heard of his story, 'religious people telling me why I survived,' and those who've lost loved ones. To the last group, he says, 'I feel like a complete charlatan, because I didn't die. All I can say is: this is my experience, take from it what you can. I didn't do anything special or heroic. If there were heroes, they were Dave and Duncan. It certainly wasn't me. I was very much the damsel in distress.'
Now with daughters aged eight and four, he still works in the industry, but as a supervisor on deck rather than a diver below the waves. It's clear how much he values the camaraderie of sat diving, and how thrilled he is that the movie shows this. 'I hope people take away the warmth that everyone has for each other, the family environment, the fact that people really care. It's a story of hope.'
