Shipwreck survivor ... Harrison Okene managed to find an air pocket in the sunken tugboat and wait for three days to be rescued. Credit:Reuters "Just keep him there, keep him calm, OK? Just reassure him, pat him on the shoulder," the controller says. "Just reassure him, give him a thumbs up, reassure him." Ship's cook Okene, 29, was on board the Jascon-4 tugboat when it capsized on May 26 due to heavy Atlantic ocean swells about 32 kilometres off the coast of Nigeria, while stabilising an oil tanker filling up at a Chevron platform. Of the 12 people on board, divers recovered 10 dead bodies while a remaining crew member has not been found. Unlike his 11 colleagues, who were locked in their rooms to keep safe from pirates, Okene was able to find an air pocket and wait for rescue.

He was trapped for more than three days, with no food or water. Okene was dazed after being thrown from one end of the small cubicle to the other in the dark. "As I was coming out of the toilet it was pitch black so we were trying to link our way out to the water tidal [exit hatch]," Okene told Reuters in June from his home town of Warri, a city in Nigeria's oil-producing Niger Delta. "Three guys were in front of me and suddenly water rushed in full force. I saw the first one, the second one, the third one just washed away. I knew these guys were dead." I was very, very cold and it was black

He groped his way into the engineers' office, took two mattresses from the beds and sat on top of them, hoping to stay afloat. He could hear marine life swimming through the ship, and loud noises as fish started fighting over something - which he feared was the body of one of his colleagues. "I was very, very cold and it was black. I couldn't see anything," Okene said. "But I could perceive the dead bodies of my crew were nearby. I could smell them. The fish came in and began eating the bodies. I could hear the sound. It was horror." Okene said he heard the sounds of the hammer hitting the vessel on May 28 and then saw light from a head torch of someone swimming along a passageway past the room he was in.

"I went into the water and tapped him. I was waving my hands and he was shocked," Okene said. The divers had been on a body recovery mission, not a rescue mission. Okene had been underwater for so long, he had to be brought up slowly and put in a decompression chamber for 60 hours. When he arrived to the surface, he thought he had only been trapped for 12 hours. The cook describes his extraordinary survival story as a "miracle" but the memories of his time in the watery darkness still haunt him and he is not sure he will return to the sea.

"When I am at home sometimes it feels like the bed I am sleeping in is sinking. I think I'm still in the sea again. I jump up and I scream," Okene said, shaking his head. "I don't know what stopped the water from filling that room. I was calling on God. He did it. It was a miracle." Watch the entire, 14-minute video on LiveLeak.

Fairfaix NZ, Reuters

