Trapped 100 Feet Under: How One Man Survived Three Days in a Sunken Ship.
There are stories that stretch what we believe is possible. Then there is the story of Harrison Okene, which seems to rewrite the rules entirely.
In 2013, a tugboat capsized in the rough waters of the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Nigeria. The vessel, called the *Jascon-4*, was working on an oil field when it was hit by a powerful wave. In moments, it was pulled under, sinking nearly 100 feet to the ocean floor.
The crew, twelve men in total, were lost almost immediately. The news was a grim foregone conclusion: no one could survive a sinking like that. Search efforts turned to recovery, a sad mission to bring the lost home.
But they were wrong. There was a thirteenth man.
Harrison Okene was the ship’s cook. When the boat flipped, he was thrown into a pitch-black bathroom. As the vessel sank, the room became an upside-down, freezing trap. By a stroke of fortune, a single pocket of air was caught in the corner of the small space. That air, no bigger than a small office cubicle, was all he had.
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For nearly three days, Harrison existed in complete darkness. The water around him was icy. He could hear nothing but the occasional groan of the metal ship settling on the seabed. He had no food, and the oxygen was slowly being used up. The bodies of some of his crewmates floated past him in the dark. He later said the fear was so thick he could taste it, a constant metallic dread in his mouth.
His only weapon against the terror was prayer. In the crushing quiet, he spoke to God. He bargained, he pleaded, and he held on to a thread of hope so thin it was almost invisible.
Miles away, and days later, a team of commercial divers from a Dutch company was sent down. Their job was morbid and straightforward: to find the wreck and retrieve the bodies for the families.
When diver Nico van Heerden entered the sunken vessel, he was moving through a tomb. He was collecting remains, his lights cutting through the murky water. Then, something impossible happened.
From a dark corner, a human hand reached out and brushed his shoulder.
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Van Heerden’s own account is chilling. He said he jumped back in pure shock. In that environment, the only thing that should have been moving was the current. But there, in the beam of his light, was a man—alive, wide-eyed, and desperately reaching for help.
“It was a hand. I see a hand… It’s moving!” he shouted to his team over the communications line. At first, they thought the pressure had gotten to him, that he was seeing things. But he wasn’t.
They had found Harrison Okene.
The rescue was delicate and dangerous. Bringing a man to the surface from that depth too quickly can kill him. They had to get him into a diving bell and slowly decompress him for another two days. When he finally stepped onto a boat, into the blinding sunlight, he had been submerged for a total of 72 hours.
His survival was called a miracle by the divers who found him. Doctors could barely explain how his body had endured the cold, the pressure, and the lack of oxygen. But he did more than endure. He waited. He prayed. And in the deepest dark imaginable, he reached out a hand, changing a recovery mission into the most unlikely rescue the sea has ever seen.
Trapped 100 Feet Under: How One Man Survived Three Days in a Sunken Ship.
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