Last Breath: Real-life drama of the North Sea diver who cheated death

Stephen Applebaum tells the story of Chris Lemons, left trapped without oxygen for half an hour on the seabed, and the rescue bid mounted by his colleagues in what is diving’s most dangerous industry

Diving for dear life: a still from the film ‘Last Breath’, which follows the story of saturation diver Chris Lemons (Stills courtesy of Dogwoof)

Imagine being stuck at the bottom of the North Sea, with an emergency supply of air that is quickly running out, and no immediate help available. Such was the predicament that diver Chris Lemons was plunged into on 18 September 2012, when the umbilical cord that connected him to a diving bell, providing him with gas for breathing, hot water, communications and electricity, snapped, during routine work on a drilling structure at the Huntington oil field, 115 miles east of Peterhead, Aberdeenshire.

What happened next became a sensation inside the global diving community. People were keen to know how Lemons’s employer, Bibby Offshore (now renamed Rever Offshore), had dealt with the situation, so the company commissioned a short industry film, Lifeline, from Floating Harbour Films, in 2013, to, says the production company’s website, “highlight the potentially extreme consequences of an incident in the workplace”.

This has now been developed into Last Breath, a feature-length documentary which uses convincing reconstructions, original footage (there was a wealth of it, captured by different devices in the water and on board the Diving Support Vessel Bibby Topaz), and gripping interviews with some of the key people involved, including Lemons’s team mates, Dave Yuasa and Duncan Allcock, and dive supervisor Craig Frederick, to create a nailbiting tale of survival against the odds.