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From Audible Originals, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds, in their own words.

On September 18, 2012,

Saturation diver Chris Lemons went to work nearly 300 feet beneath the North Sea.

A ship winched him down in a dive bell until he was near the sea floor.

Chris and a fellow diver jumped out and went to fix a pipe on an oil production site.

They breathed, communicated, and stayed warm through a network of hoses called umbilicals.

The umbilicals were connected to both the diving bell and to the ship. All systems were normal on the sea floor, but they didn't stay that way on the surface. Suddenly, though, I hear

the alarms. These are alarms that I can hear in my helmet. They are going off in dive control on the

vessel, 300 feet above me.

Chris needed to get back to the dive bell quickly, but on his way, his umbilical cord got caught,

and then it snapped. And he found himself on the sea floor, alone in the darkness,

with just a few minutes of emergency oxygen in two tanks on his back.

My name is Chris Lemons, and this is the story of how I was left 300 feet below the surface of the North Sea,

with nothing to breathe for nearly 35 minutes.

Here's Chris's story. In his own words, this is deep sea diving crisis.

Chris Lemons got into saturation diving from a summer job when he was about 20 years old and drifting a little.

I was a little bit lost in life to be truthful. I didn't really know what I wanted to do.

A friend's father helped Chris out. He just found me a little summer job really working on the back

deck of one of these dive support vessels, just servicing the divers and cleaning their tools

and doing all the donkey work, I suppose, for a bit of pocket money over the summer. But that exposed me to this world of saturation diving that, like I think, like many people, I didn't know existed. And it looked very romantic and interesting and there were slight enigmas these divers. Whilst you're on the boat with them, you don't really see them because they're locked away in these chambers for a month at a time.

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