By Michael Moran
A diver who narrowly escaped death 300ft under the sea has shared his harrowing experience of “dying”. Chris Lemon recounted the terrifying ordeal that unfolded over 300 feet below the North Sea’s surface, situated between Great Britain and the mainland of Europe , where he became detached from his team, their support vessel – and crucially, his air supply. Miraculously, he survived for 35 minutes on what should have been less than a 10-minute emergency air supply. Speaking to the People Are Deep podcast, Chris revealed he’s often approached by individuals curious about the sensation of dying. Yet, downplaying the immense peril he faced, he remarked: “Obviously I don’t have the right to tell anybody, but I suppose the crumb of comfort I can offer people is that the process wasn’t that bad.” Back in September 2012, Chris was engaged in underwater repairs on oil rig structures in the North Sea, operating from a diving bell linked to the support ship Bibby Topaz. He was one of three saturation divers on the mission. Their suits were tethered to the bell with umbilicals that supplied a vital mix of oxygen and helium for breathing, power for heating their suits against the deep sea’s biting cold, and a crucial communication line,. It was through this lifeline that Chris first sensed trouble. “Suddenly we heard some alarms,” he recalled, and then came an urgent message from the dive supervisor aboard the ship: “He really told us in no uncertain terms quite quickly that we needed to get ourselves out of the structure we were working inside and back to the diving bell,” Chris said. “He didn’t really explain what was happening, I don’t think he particularly needed to, but you could just tell from the tone of his voice that it wasn’t a drill.” A massive onboard systems failure meant that the Bibby Topaz, which was supposed to be maintaining a steady station above them, was being blown out of position – and dragging the bell and the life-preserving cable along with it. The cable was pulled taut. He continued: “I was begging them to give me a bit of extra slack – not as politely as that to be honest – but they were telling me to get back to the the diving bell.” Then the radio link was suddenly cut. He added: “Even amongst all the panic of that situation …that was a very lonely thing to happen you know suddenly you’re in a what feels like a very lonely place … it’s dark and ethereal and an alien sort of place. “Quite abruptly I had nothing to breathe, which is never good.” All Chris had to reply on was a small emergency tank, adding: “We’ll never really know how long they lasted but if you do the maths it’s something like eight or nine minutes of breathing gas.” Chris was dramatically separated from his dive partner, adding: “We had we had a bit of an eyeball to eyeball moment, it really felt like a movie at the time. We were sort of staring into each other’s eyes and I’m looking at looking at him sort of intreating him to to give me a hand and he was basically looking at me saying ‘I can do nothing.'”. “He was being pulled away himself he couldn’t quite he got with to within a couple of metres away and then he was dragged backwards by the boat.” With his support cable lost, Chris was cast into complete darkness, and the temperature inside his suit started to plummet. “It sort of dawned on me, quite quickly, that I probably wasn’t going to get out of this and this was likely to be the place I was going to die,” he confessed. The sudden realisation brought an unexpected calm over him. Chris recounted: “The feelings of panic went away and I was just overcome by grief.” At that moment, his thoughts were not of self-pity but rather of the loved ones he would leave behind, feeling an overwhelming sense of peace. For 30 minutes, Chris’s colleagues at the surface attempted to find him, even though, as the minutes ticked by, it was increasingly likely that all they would be doing was recovering his body. Finally, footage from an underwater drone showed Chris lying unconscious at a depth of 300 feet. He remembered: “Everybody’s watching this on screen – it’s very difficult for them, it would have had profound professional implications as well as personal implications.” Ultimately, the crew of the Bibby Topaz regained control of the ship and initiated a rescue operation, though by then, Chris’s chances of survival seemed slim. “By the time they do get over the top of me I think 30 to 35 minutes have passed since I’ve run out of breathing gas,” he reflected. Chris’s dive partner mustered a “superhuman effort,” to drag him into the diving bell, by which time his skin had turned “bright blue” from oxygen deprivation. He recounted: “He gave me the kiss of life, and apparently I just exhaled very very violently and came around straight away.” Remarkably, after being effectively dead for over 20 minutes, Chris started to come to. “I begin to recover fairly quickly and after three or four minutes I’m able to climb up the ladder into the diving bell myself and sit down on my chair … apparently I started to take my equipment off like nothing had happened,” he explained. There is no definitive explanation for Chris’s miracle survival story, with theories largely centring on the bitterly-cold temperatures he experienced while asphyxiating in his suit. Yet, what’s even more extraordinary than his miraculous recovery is what transpired less than a month later. Chris explained: “We were closed down for three weeks by the Health and Safety Executive while they investigated the cause but then we were given the option to go back… so we were actually the first people back in the water three weeks later. “That’s not for any bravery it was just I feel disassociated from what happened in many ways so I watched the footage and I wonder if I’m going to make it the same as anybody else.”