Trapped At The Bottom Of The Sea

It was supposed to be a routine job for a team of men who repair underwater pipelines. Then one diver’s air-supply cord snapped—when he was 300 feet down.

- By Simon Hemelryk

Leaving his fiancée to go to work was harder for Chris Lemons than for most people. He is a deep-sea diver, typically away from home for four-week stints several times a year. This time he had a job replacing oil pipes at the bottom of the North Sea more than 120 miles off Aberdeen, in northeast Scotland. As Lemons, 32, got ready to leave that day in September 2012, he gave his fiancée, Morag Martin, the usual reassurances: “Don’t worry. It’s a carefully controlled environment.”

“I’ll miss you,” said Martin, 39. “But we’ll keep in touch all the time.”

The couple had met five years earlier at a party. Lemons, a six-foot-four-inch Englishman, was a diver and dive-boat crewman. He was drawn to Martin’s gregariousness, while she found him kind and funny. They started dating, and soon Lemons moved in with Martin. They lived frugally while he trained in 2011 in specialized saturation (SAT) diving, a job that involves maintaining seabed pipes for the oil and gas industry. It has its risks, from decompression sickness to drowning— several SAT divers have died in recent decades around the world. But Martin knew how much it meant to him.

And it paid well, helping the couple plan an exciting future together. Martin had recently become the headteacher at a school in the Scottish Highlands, and they were building a dream house overlooking the sea. Their wedding was set for the following April.