Chris Lemons

Chris Lemons has been a commercial diver for over 18 years, and currently specializes in deep sea saturation diving, operating almost exclusively in the oil and gas industry.

This highly specialized 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 seabed in a diving bell, and working at depths of up to 900 feet for six hours at a time.

In September of 2012, a freak failure of the dynamic positioning system of the vessel he was working under resulted in the umbilical which provides him with breathing gas, light, and heat being severed completely. He was left on the seabed, in complete darkness 300 feet below the surface, with only the five minutes 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 fetch him, and his miraculous survival story has baffled experts ever since.

His extraordinary story was subsequently immortalized in the hit Netflix/BBC documentary "Last Breath," a version of which was developed into a Hollywood movie starring Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu and Finn Cole and released in 2025.

Lemons was born in Edinburgh, raised in Cambridge, and now lives in the South of France with his partner and two daughters.