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Harrison Okene won’t forget the moment the boat he was sailing in began to sink
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- Author, editor
- Scroll, BBC News World*
- September 17, 2023
Updated 5 hours ago
The then 29yearold Nigerian was working as a cook on board a tugboat (a boat that helps ships and other watercraft maneuver safely in the port area) called Jascon 4, which was about 20 miles (32 kilometers) off the coast of Nigeria at the time and sank due to a sudden failure.
“I had just gone to the toilet. I closed the door and was sitting on the toilet when the boat turned left,” he recalled in a recent interview with the BBC radio program Outlook.
The sinking happened so quickly that none of the 13 crew members managed to reach the surface before the ship filled with water.
“The next thing I knew, the toilet I was sitting on was suddenly over my head,” Harrison said.
“The lights went out and I heard people screaming. I managed to open the door and get out, but I couldn’t find anyone. The force of the water pushed me into one of the huts and I was trapped there.”
What he could never have imagined in that moment of panic was that this jet of water would also bring good luck.
This propelled him toward an air bubble, an oxygen oasis that would allow him to accomplish an unimaginable feat: survive on the ocean floor for almost three days. A wreck that would take the lives of the entire Jascon 4 team on that fateful May 26, 2013.
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Reproduction of how the Jascon 4 was left at the bottom of the ocean and where the air bubble was that allowed Harrison Okene to stay alive
Inexperienced sailor
Unlike many of his colleagues, Harrison did not have much experience as a sailor.
The chef told Outlook that he had actually “never set foot on a ship” before landing a job aboard a ship in 2010.
Harrison was a chef at a hotel and was able to support his wife and children.
However, as the offshore oil boom grew in his home state of Delta State, he realized he could make much more money as a cook aboard one of the many ships involved in extracting oil from the seabed.
He remembers that his first experience was not very auspicious. “Although I liked the water, I felt seasick from the moment I boarded the ship and spent three days crawling on the floor, vomiting and cooking at the same time,” he reported. “But after three days I was completely fine and have never suffered from seasickness since.”
After this minor setback, he realized that he was much happier working on a ship where he only had to serve twelve people instead of the hundreds he was used to at the hotel. In addition, employment at sea had other advantages.
“The longer the trip, the more you get paid and you don’t spend it, you have no way to spend it. So when you get back on land you have all the money at your disposal. “So I enjoyed the work,” he said.
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Oil exploration in the Atlantic, opposite the coast where Harrison lives, provides lucrative work for locals.
Despite his lack of experience, Harrison was not afraid of living at sea.
“I felt very comfortable because I like the environment, it is very peaceful, quiet, there are no noises, you just feel the rocking of the ship,” he describes.
He even got into the habit of tying all of his pots and pans with rope so that they wouldn’t fall over in the flood.
Not even a nightmare about his boat sinking could make him nervous.
“When I woke up, I laughed and thought, ‘That wasn’t real,'” he said, clarifying that “I didn’t die in the dream.”
The sinking of the Jascon 4
In May 2013, Harrison began work on the Jascon 4. Although he was unfamiliar with the ship, he had previously sailed with the rest of the crew.
“We were friends, we were very close,” he reports, saying that many “treated me like a mother and shared their ideas and their grief with me. I gave them what little advice I could to help them.”
On May 25, the tug had done heavy work stabilizing an oil tanker on a Chevron platform in stormtossed seas.
That morning Harrison woke up and went to the kitchen as usual to prepare things. Until he went to the toilet and suddenly everything changed.
He remembers feeling the ship sinking. “It sank quickly. I was in a panic. I heard people screaming and crying. It was five to ten in the morning, so some of my colleagues were still asleep. They screamed for help. You could hear the water bubbling as it went into the different compartments. And then silence.
When the ship finally hit the seabed about 100 feet above the surface, Harrison was the only survivor. He was trapped in a small room, waist deep in water. It was dark and cold.
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Harrison Okene spent three days like this, trapped in the ship.
At that moment he thought that someone would come to save him, but two days passed and nothing happened.
He managed to find a flashlight attached to a life jacket. Desperate to escape, he swam through a sunken door to the nearest hut in search of a way out. But he found nothing. Then his flashlight went out and he was left in complete darkness.
He remembers how fish ate his skin, which he had injured by hitting him while sinking. “I only wore underwear,” 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 drink and aware that the oxygen in his miraculous air bubble was running out.
Nonetheless…
On land, the crew’s families were told they had all died, and the company that owned the Jascon 4, West African Ventures, hired experts to recover the bodies.
The Dutch diving company DCN Global was commissioned to carry out this mission.
The company sent three divers to the sunken boat, coordinated by a supervisor who could monitor their actions through a camera from a boat on the surface.
The divers were brought to the seabed in a pressure chamber.
Harrison could hear them as they broke open the doors to enter the ship. He started banging on the cubicle walls to get her attention.
He was desperate. “There was almost no oxygen left in the air bubble and it was difficult to breathe.”
The first thing he saw was the reflection of a flashlight. “I dove underwater to try to follow this flashlight and when I saw the water bubbling, I knew it was a diver.”
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An underwater camera captured the moment diver Nicolaas van Heerden grabbed Harrison’s hand
The man in question, Nicolaas van Heerden, later told Outlook that the feeling of someone grabbing him was “the most terrifying moment of my entire career, although the terror was obviously quickly replaced by the adrenaline and excitement of finding someone alive.”
“I just wanted to touch him and walk away because I knew he would be scared and I didn’t want to hurt him,” says Harrison, who says he was “scared too” and was so surprised to have survived that he It wasn’t I’m not even sure if he was human.
Nicolaas explains that finding Harrison alive was just the beginning of the rescue operation.
“We couldn’t just bring him to the surface. We had to decompress him and find a safe way to get him out.”
Rescuers brought him scuba gear and explained how to use it. Then they slowly led him through the sunken ship.
“Everything was full of mud, you couldn’t see anything,” reports 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 it’s an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” he says.
After three days on the ocean floor, 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, his family was informed that he was found alive. “My wife fainted and had to be taken to hospital but she was fine.”
After the third day, he was taken to the hospital by helicopter and, after an examination, was allowed to return home, where not only his family was waiting for him, but also many people who had heard about the miracle.
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Harrison became a media celebrity in the days following his rescue
In the days that followed, his incredible story of survival went viral after the divers who found him posted a video of the incredible rescue on social media.
Incredibly, although Harrison promised never to go near water again, an accident sometime later in which his car fell off a bridge and sank into a lake (he managed to get out and even saved his companion) caused him to an unexpected decision: he became a professional diver.
“After the first incident, I said I would never go to the sea again, but I’m still there because I know that’s where I’m supposed to be, that it’s my environment and I’ll always be near it.” he says.
“It’s my destiny, that’s how God wanted it to be.”
*You can listen to the Outlook program on which this article is based here