Harrison Odjegba Okene: The Nigerian Cook Who Survived Three Days In A Sunken Boat
DCN DivingHarrison Odjegba Okene spent 72 hours in an air pocket in a sunken ship — and miraculously survived.
When it comes to creepy stories, there’s arguably no spookier setting than the ocean. Vast and mainly unexplored, it defies the unknown and pits our own imaginations against us. But for Nigerian cook Harrison Odjegba Okene, the danger of the ocean was horrifyingly real — as he spent three days underwater in the small air pocket of a sunken boat waiting to die.
The cook’s spooky story on May 26, 2013, began routinely enough. The 29-year-old was one of 12 crew members on the Jacson 4, one of three tugboats towing a Chevron oil tanker across Nigerian waters. But at 4:30 a.m., the tugboat gave a sudden lurch and then was capsized. It was then dragged to the seabed 100 feet below — while Okene was in the bathroom.
“I heard people shouting, I felt the vessel going down, going down,” he said. “I heard a voice saying ‘Is this vessel sinking or what?’… I was in the WC and the WC fell on my head, things started falling on my head… My colleagues were shouting, ‘God help me, God help me, God help me.’ Then after a while I never heard from them (again).”
Okene felt his way out of the bathroom in the dark and hoped his colleagues had successfully escaped. That is, until he heard the sound of either sharks or barracudas gnawing and fighting over something “big.” Finding two flashlights, a life vest, and tools, he made his way to a cabin that felt “safe” to him with a big air pocket. He then made a rack on top of a platform and piled two mattresses on top as the waters continued to rise.
For the next 72 hours, Okene survived on one bottle of Coke and the Bible. A devoutly religious man, he recited the same verses that his wife had pointed to the night before his trip. He also promised God that he would never return to the ocean if he survived the experience. And on the third day, a miracle emerged — in the form of divers outside of the sunken ship.
The man who rescued Okene was part of a Dutch company called DCN Diving, which had been deployed to retrieve the dead bodies of the fallen men on the boat. The diver couldn’t believe that anyone had survived the ordeal, and upon finding Okene, he shouted: “He’s alive!”
In the end, Okene had to be warmed up with hot water, hooked up to an oxygen mask, and placed in a decompression chamber before he could be safely taken to the surface. It’s been nearly a decade since his creepy true story at sea, but Okene has no plans of ever returning to the ocean — having found a perfectly fine cooking job on dry land.
