MegaMoneySweeps
← Reading room

Long odds

The 10 Luckiest People of All Time

Miraculous survivals, impossible fortunes, and at least two stories that fall apart when you check them.

14 min read · page 10 of 11

9

Harrison Okene, who breathed at the bottom of the sea

Sixty hours in an air pocket in a capsized tugboat, thirty metres down.

In May 2013 the tugboat Jascon 4 capsized off Nigeria and sank. Okene, the ship's cook, was in the bathroom when it rolled. Eleven crew died. He found a pocket of trapped air in a cabin and stayed in it.

He was in total darkness, in water around 30°C, for roughly sixty hours, hearing, as he later described it, fish eating his colleagues. He had a bottle of Coca-Cola and nothing else.

A South African dive team arrived to recover bodies. A diver's hand was grabbed in the dark by a living man. The helmet-camera footage of that moment exists and is genuinely difficult to watch.

Okene should have died of decompression sickness from ascending after three days at that pressure; he was put into a decompression chamber for two and a half days and came out fine. He has since, and this is the part that beggars belief, qualified as a commercial diver.