The man who survived 60 hours on a sunken ship at the bottom of the sea

Harrison Okene won’t forget the moment the ship he was sailing on began to sink.

The Nigerian, then 29 years old, was working as a cook on board a tugboat, the Jascon 4, which was moored about 20 miles off the coast of Nigeria when it suddenly capsized due to a malfunction.

“I had just gone to the toilet. “I closed the door and was sitting on the toilet when the ship turned to the left,” he recently recalled in an interview with the radio program BBC Outlook.

The sinking was so rapid that none of the thirteen crew members managed to get on deck before the ship filled with water.

“The next thing I saw was the toilet I was sitting on suddenly on top of my head,” Harrison said.

“The lights went out and I heard everyone screaming, screaming, screaming. I managed to open the door and get out, but I couldn’t find anyone there. The force of the water pushed me towards one of the huts and I was imprisoned there”.

What he could never have imagined in that moment of panic is that this burst of water would also be a stroke of luck. He pushed him towards one Air bubblean oasis of oxygen that would allow him to perform an unthinkable feat: survive at the bottom of the sea for almost 3 days.

A shipwreck that would claim the lives of the entire rest of the Jascon 4 crew on that fateful May 26, 2013.

inexperienced sailor

Unlike some of his colleagues, Harrison did not have much experience as a sailor.

The cook told Outlook that, in fact, “I had never set foot on a boat before” before landing a job aboard a ship in 2010.

Harrison had been a hotel chef and managed to support his wife and children.

But as the offshore oil boom grew in his home state of Delta State, he realized he could make much more money as a chef aboard one of the many ships used to extract crude oil from the seabed.

Remember that your first experience was not very promising.

“Although I loved the water, from the moment I came on board I suffered from dizziness and I crawled on the floor for three daysvomiting and cooking at the same time,” he said.

“But after three days it was perfect and I have never had seasickness in the ocean since.”

After that little mistake, he discovered that it was much happier working on a boat, where he only had to serve 12 people and not the hundreds he was used to in the hotel.

Moreover, maritime employment had other advantages.

“The longer the trip, the more they pay you, and you don’t spend it, you can’t spend it. Then when you come ashore, you can count on all that money. So I enjoyed the work,” he said.

Despite his lack of experience, Harrison I wasn’t afraid of life by the sea.

“I felt very good because I like the atmosphere. It is very calm, it is quiet, there is no sound, all you feel is how the boat rocks,” he describes.

He had even gotten used to having to tie all his pots and pans with ropes so that they wouldn’t fall over with the flood.

Not even a nightmare about his ship sinking could unnerve him.

“I laughed when I woke up, I thought, ‘It wasn’t real,’” he said, clarifying that “in the dream he did not die”.

The sinking of the Jascon 4

In May 2013, he started working on the Jascon 4. Although he was unfamiliar with the boat, he had sailed with the rest of the crew before.

“We were friends, we were very close,” he says, saying that many “treated me like a mother and shared their ideas and sorrows with me. I gave them what little advice I could give them to help them.”

On May 25, the tugboat had been hard at work stabilizing an oil tanker on a Chevron platform in the middle of stormy seas.

That morning, Harrison woke up and went to the kitchen as usual to get everything ready. Until he went to the bathroom and suddenly everything changed.

He remembers feeling the ship sinking. “I fell very quickly. I was panicking. I heard people screaming, crying. It was ten to five in the morning, so some of my classmates were still asleep. They screamed for help. You heard the water bubbling as it entered the different rooms and then, Silence”.

When the ship finally ran aground on the seabed, about 100 feet above the surface, Harrison was the only one left alive. He was imprisoned in a small place, with water up to the waist. It was dark and cold.

At that moment he thought someone would come and save him, but… two days passed and nothing.

He managed to find a flashlight attached to a life jacket. Desperate to escape, he swam through a recessed door into the next hut in search of an exit. But I couldn’t find anything. Then his flashlight died and was left in absolute darkness.

Don’t forget to feel fish eating its wounded skin of the blows during the shipwreck. “I was only dressed in boxers,” he explains.

“I thought about my wife, my mother. I spent the time singing praises,” he recalls.

It was like that for 60 hours. Without food or water, and aware that the oxygen in his miraculous bubble was being used up.

In the meantime…

On land, for the families of the crew members They were told that everyone had diedand the company that owns the Jascon 4, West African Ventures, hired experts to recover the bodies.

The person responsible for carrying out this mission was the Dutch diving company DCN Global.

The company sent three divers to the sunken ship, coordinated by a supervisor who could monitor their actions with a camera from a ship on the surface.

The divers were taken to the bottom of the sea in a pressure chamber.

Harrison could hear them as they broke open the doors to enter the ship. He started banging on the walls of the hut to get her attention.

I was desperate. “There was almost no oxygen in the bubble.“I had trouble breathing.”

The first thing he saw was the reflection of a flashlight. “I went underwater to try to follow that flashlight, and when I saw the water bubbling, I knew it was a diver.”

The man in question, Nicolaas van Heerde, would later tell Outlook that he felt someone grabbing him.”It was the scariest moment of my entire career.although of course the fear was quickly replaced by adrenaline and excitement at having found someone alive.

“I just wanted to touch him and get away because I knew he was going to be scared and I didn’t want to get hurt,” says Harrison, who says he was “scared too,” and that he was so surprised he had survived that he ‘didn’t even’ was ‘I’m sure it was human’.

Nicholas explains that finding him was alive only the beginning of the rescue operation.

“We couldn’t just bring it to the surface. “We had to decompress it and find a safe way to get it out.”

The rescuers brought him diving equipment and explained how to use it. Then they led him slowly through the sunken ship.

“Everything was full of mud, you couldn’t see anything,” says Harrison, who experienced the moment calmly.

When he entered the pressure chamber and realized he was the only survivor, he began to cry.

‘I survived, but that’s the way it is an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone“, there stands that.

After three days on the seabed, Harrison had to spend another three days in a decompression chamber on the ship to normalize his nitrogen levels, which build up in tissues under high pressure and can cause a heart attack.

Meanwhile, they informed his family that he had been found alive. “My wife he fainted and they had to take her to the hospital, but she was fine.

After the third day, they took him to the hospital by helicopter, and after checking they let him go home, where not only his family was waiting for him, but also many people who had heard about the miracle.

In the days that followed, his incredible survival story He went around the world after the divers who found him published the video of the incredible rescue on social networks.

Incredibly, although Harrison vowed never to go near the water again, an accident occurred some time later in which his car went off a bridge and sank into a lake (he again managed to get out and even killed his passenger). rescue), him to a decision. unexpectedly: it was done professional diver.

“After the first incident I said I would never return to the ocean, but I am still there because I know it is where I need to be, it is my environment and I will always be close to it,” he says .

“Is my fate“It’s the way God wanted it.” (JO)