How long can you survive at the bottom of a 7ft deep swimming pool? You could possibly hold your breath for about 3-4 minutes at max and then, you pass out.
Even if we could somehow breathe underwater, our bodies would give in to the intense pressure, or hypothermia would set in and/or a million different things that would end our lives.
And that’s exactly what should’ve happened to Harrison Okene when the boat he was on, Jascon 4, sank in the Atlantic in 2013. But the man survived underwater for 60 hours. That’s almost 3 days, before being rescued.
He was one of 12 crew members when the craft capsized 12 miles off the Nigerian coast in May 2013. The ship turned over and sank to the bottom of the ocean and rested there.
Due to piracy rules in the region, all crew members were supposed to lock their doors from inside. So when the water came rushing in, they could not get out. Harrison, however, who was in the washroom at that moment, managed to get out of the room but the water simply pushed him into another washroom where he held on to a sink to keep his head above the water as the boat drowned.
He managed to make a makeshift bed of sorts with a mattress and debris and sat on it, in pitch dark and ice-cold water while hearing the noises of his friends being eaten by fish.
The first rescue came the very next day and Harrison banged on the wall to let them know but his cries didn’t reach the divers.
In the almost three days he was in the ocean, he had only a bottle of Coke to survive on. The divers who found him 2 days later were not meant to be a rescue mission. They were there to go look for corpses.
It is a miracle how he survived on the seafloor for that long, given the lack of oxygen, the increase in carbon dioxide as he kept breathing and worst of all, the accumulation of nitrogen in his cells.
Somehow, Harrison had managed to survive for as long as he had, when he heard a second team of divers, this time descending into the boat. So he reached out to the one closest to him.
The diver who found him initially believed he had found a corpse when he just saw Harrison’s hand but then it grabbed him and they knew, someone had survived!
You can watch his rescue here:
Harrison has had PTSD since and has vowed never to return to sea again!