Christopher Lemons

Deep Sea Diver at Boskalis Subsea Services

Speaker

Chris has been a commercial diver for over 14 years and currently specialises in deep-sea saturation diving, operating almost exclusively in the oil and gas industry. This highly specialised form of diving involves living in the claustrophobic confines of a decompression chamber for up to 28 days at a time, commuting daily to the sea bed in a diving bell, and working at depths of up to 900 feet for 6 hours at a time.

In September of 2012, a freak failure of the dynamic positioning system of the vessel Chris was working under resulted in the umbilical, which provided him with breathing gas, light and heat, being severed completely. He was left on the sea bed, in complete darkness, 300 feet below the surface, with only 5 minutes’ worth of breathing gas he carried in the emergency tanks on his back, and no way to protect himself from the freezing temperatures.

It took his heroic rescuers over 40 minutes to come back and find him, and his miraculous survival has baffled experts ever since. This extraordinary story was subsequently immortalised in the hit Netflix/BBC documentary ‘Last Breath’, while Chris continues to dive to this day.