The tugboat was one of three towing an oil tanker in Nigeria’s oil-rich Delta waters when it gave a sudden lurch and keeled over. It quickly sank 100 feet to the ocean bottom. It was 4:30 a.m., and cook Harrison Odjegba Okene was in the bathroom. He was thrown from one end of the small cubicle to another. All the lights went out. He groped his way out of the toilet and tried to find a way out, propping open doors as he moved on. He discovered some tools, two flashlights and a bottle of Coke.
When he found a cabin of the sunken vessel that felt safe, he began the long wait, getting colder and colder as he played back a mental tape of his life — remembering his mother, friends, mostly the woman he’d married five years before with whom he hadn’t yet fathered a child. He worried about his 11 colleagues; he got really worried when he heard the sound of fish, shark or barracudas he supposed, eating and fighting over something big.
As the temperature dropped to freezing, Okene, dressed only in boxer shorts, recited the last psalm his wife had sent him by text message before he had gone to bed, sometimes called the Prayer for Deliverance: “Oh God, by your name, save me… The Lord sustains my life” (Psalm 54:1,4). For 72 hours the Nigerian cook survived by breathing an ever-dwindling supply of oxygen in an air pocket. He begged God for a miracle.
Salvage divers working on the scene had already recovered four bodies and expected to find more. They had TV cameras strapped to their diving helmets and relayed murky images back to the rescue vessel on the surface. So when a hand appeared on the TV screen in the rescue boat, showing what the rescue diver saw, everybody assumed it was another corpse. The diver went to grab the hand, and the hand grabbed him. The rescuer recoiled in shock but soon realized he had found a survivor.
Okene couldn’t have lasted much longer; the air in his small compartment was dwindling rapidly. He was the only survivor. His relatives had already been told that he was dead.
The Nigerian kept faith with the psalm he recited, that promises to “give thanks in your name, Lord,” (Psalm 54:6) by giving his testimony of salvation at a service at his Redeemed Christian Church of God.
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The video of Okene’s rescue can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArWGILmKCqE