TRAPPED IN THE WATERS
The Harrison Okene Story
by Kyt Lyn Walken
This story features a head chef. Yes, you read that correctly. Not an explorer, not a climber. Not even a survivalist.
A simple chef who never imagined being involved in a shipwreck.
And never, once it happened, would he have imagined getting out alive.
A ship, a shipwreck, a man who survives 30 meters deep: let’s try to better understand the story of Harrison Okene.
29-year-old Nigerian, Harrison finds a job as a head cook in the tugboat of an American oil company called Chevron, established in 1911 in California. It’s an easy, well-paid job, and young Harrison doesn’t mind such a job. He has to help his mother and he has also just got married.
The days pass quietly until the morning of May 26, 2013, and precisely at 4.30. Okene is in what was once gracefully identified as “the comfortable place” when he feels the boat jerk and senses that it is quickly folding to one side.
I’m in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Nigeria.
“I was terrified” – he later recalls in an interview with the Nigeria’s Nation newspaper – “it was dark, I was thrown from one end of the tiny room to the other”.
Okene has the presence of mind to slip on the life jacket and grab two flashlights. But not only that: it moves to a point still not completely flooded by water which – in a true reminiscence of the Titanic disaster – is submerging the entire boat.
He begins his struggle for survival, in which some mattresses play a fundamental role – which he diligently stacks to gain height, a Coke – which will be his only meal – and the psalms his wife had sent him to his mobile phone. He prays incessantly, but despair, combined with hypothermia, advances cruelly and fast, too fast.
Harrison hears a sound he recognizes as an anchor. Suddenly he grabs a piece of metal, knocks on the side of his shelter. Only silence answers him.
The hours pass excruciatingly.
After 72 hours, divers see a hand on the probe screen. They think of yet another corpse: in fact, there are five men who are missing. Tony Walker, a member of the Dutch company DCN Diving, specializing in marine rescue, exclaims: “What is it? What the hell is this? – He’s alive, he’s alive!”
Excited, Walker remembers in retrospect: “It was a terrifying moment, for the man down there, for the divers and for us who were at the console”.
Okene is rescued and placed in a hyperbaric chamber to ensure the increase in body temperature through jets of hot water. But he is safe, and the oxygen, almost on the point of ending inside his ravine, was instead sufficient to guarantee his safety. His willpower and faith did the rest.
The will to survive, determination, faith and courage. These are the values in which we at Bivo believe to be by your side in every adventure. Everywhere.
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