Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be under the water?
And what I mean by “under” is really the deepest point, the ocean’s bottom.
For some people, it’s really a huge place.
Huge enough to be considered a terrifying place.
But do you know what really is terrifying?
It’s when you go under it because it tends to be even more massive.
In fact, over 80% of the world's oceans are what people have yet to explore, observe,
and discover.
This simply implies that if you go down on a ship, you will most likely sink to a depth
that no one has ever imagined.
This must also explain the reason when boats and people sink, rescuers are unable to save
them, and they would just go missing.
And, in some situations, entire planes with hundreds of people on board that sink would
simply disappear, unable to be found.
Only a small portion of those people who sink down there would be able to manage to return
back to land.
So, we can say that managing to stay alive at the bottom of the ocean without anyone
to help or equipment to breathe is really unimaginable.
But now you have to imagine and believe that there is this Nigerian man, whose name is
Harrison Odjegba Okene, who has managed to stay alive, making him both the unluckiest
and luckiest person who has ever lived.
And this is his story: Okene was working as a cook on board the tugboat
Jascon-4 in 2013.
On the 26th of May, he was with other staff late at night, at around 32 kilometers from
the coast of Nigeria in the Gulf of Guinea.
At around 4:30 a.m., a very huge wave hit the Jascon-4 when they were attempting to
work together to stabilize a Chevron oil tanker.
This made the tugboat flip over and snapped their rope.
The tugboat began to sink quickly, causing panic among the other 12 crew members on board.
As a precaution against pirate raids, it was common practice to lock the crew in their
cabins.
Yes, being locked within a cabin works well against pirates who may threaten their lives;
however, it does not work so well when your cabin is being flooded with water.
But luckily, Okene wasn’t in his cabin at that time.
At the time before the ship flipped over, he had left his cabin and went to the bathroom
only wearing his underwear.
When the wave hit, he was tossed around within the bathroom, but he managed to open the door
before the room filled with water.
He then witnessed as several of his colleagues were then swept outside of the boat.
Okene forced himself to get out of the bathroom and go into another.
There, he managed to keep his head above water until the boat hit the ocean floor 30 meters
below the surface.
That’s nearly the height of a seven-story building!
And even though he was freezing, he managed to climb his way out of the dangerous little
bathroom that he was in.
Underwater, Okene couldn't see anything and couldn’t breathe.
Because of that, he used his hands to navigate where to go until he miraculously discovered
another larger air pocket in the engineer's office.
He then stayed there almost fully naked.
And in that very cold, wet room with a quickly decreasing supply of oxygen with no food or
fresh water, his chances of surviving were very low.
He was stuck in a small pocket of air, about 1.2 meters high and six cubic meters in volume,
and the reasons for his low chance of surviving are quite visible.
First, he may have died from dehydration.
Second, he may have died from feeling too cold.
Third, the water could have filled the area, drowning him.
Fourth, the probability of him running out of air to breathe and getting suffocated is
very high.
And the worst case, he may be eaten alive by sharks who were already searching the damaged
boat.
The most intriguing part now is how he managed to avoid dying in that situation.
To begin with, he prevented the chance of him getting dehydrated by drinking a few cans
of coke around him.
Next, he placed the he had discovered underneath him.
That mattress became very useful in keeping part of his chest and his entire head above
the freezing water, allowing his core to remain warm and preventing hypothermia.
It's worth noting that if it hadn't been because of the mattress, the extremely cold water
would have already killed him.
However, his biggest problem was that the oxygen in that tiny pocket of air where he
was trapped was running out.
He can withstand that situation for 60 hours, according to estimates that are based on the
size of the pocket he was in and the pressure of being under 30 meters beneath the ocean.
More than that, the danger wasn't only from running out of oxygen to breathe, but also
he could have possibly poisoned himself by exhaling too much carbon dioxide.
So, how was he able to get through it?
Fortunately, water quickly absorbs carbon dioxide.
And because he was splashing the water around the area, he unknowingly increased the water
surface area.
That also increased the rate of carbon dioxide absorption.
As a result, the chance of him getting poisoned within never grew high.
However, while trying to hang in that situation, he had to become used to the sounds of sharks
breaking in the damaged boat and eating his colleagues' corpses.
Luckily, the sharks never found him in the tiny pocket he was in.
Okene had been trapped, his body half-submerged at the bottom of the ocean in a tiny pitch-black
six cubic meter area.
And he had to endure it for about 60 extremely torturous and terrifying hours.
And while he was barely breathing the absolute limit of his limited oxygen supply, he finally
heard the sound of knocking.
It was probably within an hour or two of suffocating.
Okene had no idea that Chevron had dispatched a team of divers to inspect the damaged boat
and recover any bodies.
Chevron didn't expect the chance of one person managing to survive the tragedy.
Hearing the sound, Okene began making a sound, banging the walls around him with all his
force and effort, but the divers couldn’t hear him.
However, when he finally saw the light from a diver coming from the water nearby, he knew
it was time for him to do something.
He then grabbed the arm of the diver that had passed in his area.
The diver, only expecting to find a corpse, was so shocked.
However, if you think Okene will be saved now, well, not yet.
There are still dangers to be aware of.
Because he had been down in the water for so long, a quick return to the surface would
have likely resulted in cardiac arrest and maybe his death.
So what the divers did was they equipped him with a diving helmet and placed him in a diving
bell before they lifted him up the water's surface.
He underwent two more days of decompression before he was finally able to return to his
normal life after his near-death experience.
Okene's terrifying experience underwater is regarded to be the longest time any human
has ever managed to stay alive underwater without the use of any diving equipment.
Okene then claims that he experienced nightmares after the incident.
And because of that, he has vowed to never return to the ocean ever again.
Yes, Okene, a Nigerian cook who had worked on a tugboat, has suffered from Thalassophobia,
a phobia from deep bodies of water such as the ocean.
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