Yowza! You don’t see something like this every day. This was shot in May, when a team of divers went down 30 meters to a sunken oil-rig service tug that capsized off the coast of Nigeria. The mission was to recover bodies, but it turned out one body wasn’t dead yet. The ship’s cook, Harrison Okene, who had gone to the head and was wearing only his boxer shorts when his world turned upside down, survived three days in an air bubble and found some Coca-Cola to drink to keep himself alive. Harrison heard the divers when they came into the tug and grabbed one, scaring the bejesus out of him. The close encounter starts at about 5:30.
One interesting audio effect: the dive coordinator, who I assume is topside, sounds like a normal person, but the divers all sound like Mickey Mouse. It adds a nice sense of the comic to the proceedings.
What blows my mind is imagining Harrison’s plight–three days immersed in water in just his skivvies, in absolute pitch darkness on the seabed, and somehow he kept it together. The divers estimated he had another two days of oxygen to breathe in his bubble before asphyxiating. After being extracted from the tug, he then had to spend two and a half days in a decompression chamber before being released into reality again.
Harrison was the only survivor. The other 11 crewmembers onboard were all lost when the tug went down. Here’s a BBC report you can watch for more details:
