TRAPPED AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

His air-supply cord severed, commercial diver Chris Lemons had minutes to live

- Simon Hemelryk

LEAVING HIS FIANCÉ TO GO TO WORK was harder for Chris Lemons than for most people. The deep-sea diver was typically away four weeks, several times a year. As Chris, 32, readied to leave one day in September 2012 for a job replacing oil pipes at the bottom of the North Sea more than 120 miles off Aberdeen, northeast Scotland, he gave Morag the usual reassurances.

“Don’t worry. It’s a carefully controlled environment.”

“I’ll miss you,” replied the 39-year-old school headmistress. “But we’ll keep in touch, all the time.”

The couple had met five years earlier at a party in Dunoon, west of Glasgow, where Morag worked at a primary school. Chris, a 6ft 4 Englishman from Cambridge, was a diver and dive-boat crewman taking a course in the area. He loved Morag’s gregariousness, while she found him kind and funny. They started dating and soon Chris moved in with her. They lived frugally while he trained in specialised saturation (SAT) diving in 2011, a job that involved maintaining seabed pipes for the oil and gas industry. It had its risks, from decompression sickness to drowning—several saturation divers had died in recent decades around the world. But Morag knew how much it meant to him.