Nigerian Man Survives 3 Days at Bottom of Atlantic

In this image made available Tuesday Dec. 3, 2013, The hand of Harrison Odjegba Okene stretches through the murky waters to reach a rescue diver as the diver’s headcam video records the moment he becomes aware that Okene is still alive after nearly three days underwater. Okene was working as a cook aboard a tugboat in the Atlantic Ocean off the Nigerian coast in June 2013, when a heavy swell caused the vessel to capsize and his boat sank to the sea bed, where his 11 colleagues drowned, but Harrison Okene was able to find an air pocket inside the sunken ship where he survived for nearly three days before being found by a group of South African rescue divers. A video made available Tuesday Dec. 3, 2013, was filmed while the South African crew searched his vessel and found Okene alive before being given water and oxygen and then led to safety and to a decompression chamber for his recovery. (AP Photo/DCN Diving)

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LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — About 100 feet down, on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, divers had already pulled four bodies out of the sunken tugboat. Then a hand appeared on a TV screen monitoring the recovery.

Everyone assumed it was another corpse, and the diver moved toward it.

“But when he went to grab the hand, the hand grabbed him!” Tony Walker, project manager for the Dutch company DCN Diving, said of the rescue in May.

Harrison Odjegba Okene, the tug’s Nigerian cook, had survived for three days by breathing an ever-dwindling supply of oxygen in an air pocket. A video of Okene’s dramatic rescue — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArWGILmKCqE — was posted on the Internet more than six months after the rescue and has gone viral this week.

As the temperature dropped to freezing, Okene, dressed only in boxer shorts, recited a psalm his wife had sent him earlier by text message, sometimes called the Prayer for Deliverance. “Oh, God, by your name, save me. … The Lord sustains my life.”

To this day, Okene believes his rescue after 72 hours underwater was the result of divine deliverance. The 11 other seamen aboard the tug Jascon 4 died.

h/t – wtop