The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that Harrison Odjegba Okene, who served as a cook aboard the tugboat, Jascon, believes it was the hand of God that saved him from the sinking that killed all other members of the crew.
His ordeal began around 4:30 a.m. on May 26 when he was getting ready for work aboard the tug which was towing an oil tanker through Nigerian waters.
The boat "gave a sudden lurch, and then keeled over," the AP reports.
“I was dazed and everywhere was dark as I was thrown from one end of the small cubicle to another,” Okene said in an interview with Nigeria’s Nation newspaper after his rescue.
He managed to make his way into a cabin in the sunken vessel with a large air pocket and there he began his three-day wait for rescue. When the water began to rise around him, he made a rack and a platform for himself out of two mattresses.
“I started calling on the name of God,” Okene told the Nation. “I started reminiscing on the verses I read before I slept. I read the Bible from Psalms 54 to 92. My wife had sent me the verses to read that night when she called me before I went to bed.”
His courage began to wane when he heard a rescue ship nearby but was unable to get the attention of the crew even while banging on the walls of the ship with a hammer.
But he was eventually discovered when his hand appeared on the TV screen that was monitoring the recovery from 100 feet above.
A diver moved toward the hand, thinking it was another body, and was shocked when it suddenly clutched him.
Okene had been found!
Rescuers used hot water to warm him up, attached him to an oxygen mask, and then put him inside a decompression chamber which enabled him to be brought safely to the surface.
Relatives, who were told there were no survivors, were ecstatic, especially his wife of just five years.
The story made headlines when a video of the dramatic rescue surfaced this week and quickly became an internet sensation.
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