The man who was trapped in a sunken ship for almost three days somehow managed to survive the ordeal (Image: Youtube/DCNDiving)
A cook working on a modest tugboat anticipated nothing more than days of hot stoves and ocean vistas would happen while he was on board- then his vessel sank.
Harrison Okene was using the toilet when the boat sank, flipping him and the entire structure and striking him on the head. The last thing he saw was a pool of his own blood before his vision was consumed by darkness.
When a freak wave struck Okene’s boat, a powerful vessel designed to tow heavy machinery like oil platforms, it overturned in seconds.
The then 29-year-old said: “I was trying to open the door to get out, when the toilet fell and hit me on the head. Everywhere was dark.”
According to The Guardian, the bathroom filled with water – and this process “didn’t take long. In “One minute, two minutes” the boat struck the seabed thirty metres below the surface on May 26, 2013.
Okene thought the fateful morning would be like any other on the Jascon-4, which was stabilising an oil tanker about 20 miles off the coast of Nigeria.
Okene had said his prayers and was about to head to the kitchen to prepare breakfast for the crew when disaster struck.
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Harrison Odjegba Okene being rescued after his tug boat sank off Nigeria’s coast (Image: AFP/Getty Images)
Dressed just in his underwear he went to the loo before his morning duties – dreaming about what he would do with his upcoming time off.
Then, the wave hit. Water began to fill the room and in a blind panic the cook reached to open the door. In the midst of the turmoil, Okene was disoriented and couldn’t discern up from down.
He met two or three colleagues in a corridor leading to the watertight door that served as an escape hatch. They all struggled to open the hatch as the water levels rose. “I did not have the patience to wait,” Okene said.
Instead, he retreated from the exit and back into the boat. Remarkably, the force of the water swept him into another lavatory in the engineer’s cabin. The door closed behind him as he was swept in, but the water level stabilised.”, reports the Mirror.
“The air couldn’t escape from the boat entirely. Some had to be trapped inside,” Okene explained. He would be confined in this four-foot pocket of air for 60 hours. All the remaining 11 of the 12 crew members perished.Okene heard the desperate “shouts, shouts, shouts” of his colleagues “calling and crying”.
He remembered trying to return to the escape hatch and breaking the bathroom door handle in his attempt to leave. Okene said: “But I told myself, instead of panicking, you have to think of a way out.
“Being one of 13 siblings, Okene was accustomed to taking on responsibilities he didn’t want. He convinced himself in this situation that he was “in charge of the situation”.
He broke a vent and used the steel to pry a door open. “One after another,” he heard his crewmates’ calls fade away. “I couldn’t hear them any more,” he said, assuming they had escaped.
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Okene was one of 12 men on the Jascon-4 that sank on 26 May 2013 (Image: Youtube/DCNDiving)
He found two lifejackets – placing one torch in his mouth he swam back to the escape hatch – but outside of his toilet there was no air pocket so he could not work for long. For hours, he alternated between his air pocket and the watertight door. “If you got stuck in any room, you were lost. It was totally dark, I was confused.
If you don’t act fast, you can lose your life there,” he said.He discovered some sardines and cola and tore the covers into strips to create a guide rope. “I could use the rope to guide myself back. “
Okene dismantled the wooden panels from the ceiling and fashioned them into a raft so he could sit away from the water in the pocket. Despite essentially being in a sensory deprivation tank – Okene realised he couldn’t escape through the hatch. He said: “So I had to keep my mind away from that. ‘Let me just stay put,’ I thought. “
He had swallowed so much sea water that his tongue began to peel and crayfish started to nibble at him.The water level continued to rise. He remembered thinking of his mother: “How is she feeling? How will the world treat her?
“I had access to nothing. Everything was thoughts and memories before my eyes. ” He sang “so many church songs. ‘Father we cannot see you, but we can see your wonders. ‘”
“I tried to kill the fear in front of me. Because one thing that can kill you fast is fear. That panic that comes at you, it kills you before your real death comes.
“Because the moment you start panicking, you use too much oxygen. “
He heard what turned out to be the sound of a diver placing a marker buoy on the vessel to warn other ships of the wreckage. He banged on the boat “trying to get a signal to the person outside”.
Then he noticed a light – or “a reflection of light like a bubble”. Then he spotted the diver swimming on a long umbilical.
Initially, the diver reported to his operation that he had discovered another body – and then Okene’s hand clasped his.
Okene was transported to the divers’ bell, and from there to a recompression chamber where he would spend an additional three days.
He couldn’t believe he had been submerged for three days and assumed it was just one night.Astonishingly, all of Okene’s vitals were normal. He said: “I thought, that’s not normal.
“However, for Okene, the nightmares persisted. He “felt the bed sinking. I would pick up my wife, carry her, and try to open the door to get out. “.