How 1 Guy Survived At the Bottom of the Ocean for 3 Days... Alone

**Harrison Okene: The Man Who Survived 460 Hours Underwater Without Diving Gear**

**Introduction: The Ocean's Depths**

The ocean, vast and mysterious, covers more than 70% of our planet. Yet, over 80% of it remains unexplored, a haunting reality that makes the deep sea both thrilling and terrifying. Stories of ships and people vanishing without trace are not uncommon, with even entire planes disappearing into its depths. However, this article recounts the extraordinary tale of Harrison Okene, a man who not only survived but also holds the record for the longest underwater survival without diving equipment.

**Harrison Okene's Background**

Harrison Okene, a Nigerian cook, was working aboard the tugboat "Jess" in 2013. The crew was stabilizing an oil tanker in the rough waters of the Gulf of Guinea when disaster struck. On May 26th, around 4:30 AM, a rogue wave, described as "freakish and big," capsized their boat, leaving the 12 crew members in a life-threatening situation.

**The Incident**

As the tugboat flipped over, most crew members were locked in their cabins for safety against pirates. However, Okene had left his cabin earlier to use the bathroom, wearing only underwear. The chaos of the capsizing tossed him around, and he managed to escape his flooding cabin. Floating above water briefly, he witnessed friends being swept away.

**Survival Struggle**

Okene found himself underwater, 30 meters below the surface, in a tiny engineers' office filled with cold, dark water. Almost naked, without food or fresh water, his survival chances were grim. The air pocket, just 1.2 meters high and six cubic meters in volume, offered limited oxygen. Despite these odds, Okene found a mattress to stay partially dry and warm, preventing hypothermia. He also discovered soda cans to prevent dehydration.

**Rescue**

For 460 harrowing hours, Okene faced the constant threat of suffocation, sharks, and cold. Chevron divers, sent to recover bodies, were shocked to find him alive. Equipped with a diving helmet, he was raised safely, spending two days decompressing to avoid cardiac arrest.

**Aftermath**

Okene's ordeal is unparalleled; his survival remains the longest underwater without diving gear. Haunted by nightmares, he vowed never to return to the ocean. His fear of the deep, known as thalassophobia, underscores the ocean's terrifying power.

**Conclusion: Learning from Home**

For those intrigued by the ocean's mysteries but hesitant to venture into its depths, Curiosity Stream offers documentaries like "Oceans of the Future" and "Deep Ocean." Access an entire year of such content for just $19.99—a deal as tempting as baby back ribs at Applebee's. Additionally, Nebula provides original content, including real-life lore videos, making home a perfect base for exploration.

Harrison Okene's story is not just one of survival but a testament to the resilience of the human spirit against nature's indifference. His tale serves as both a cautionary reminder of the ocean's dangers and an inspiration of human endurance.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video was made possible by curiosity stream when you sign up at the link in the description you'll also get access to nebula the streaming video platform that real life lore is a part of the ocean is a huge and terrifying place but it's even more huge and terrifying when you go beneath the surface more than 80% of the world's oceans are still unmapped unobserved and unexplored meaning that if you go down on a ship you're most likely going to sink down to an area that no human being has ever before seen boats and people still go missing all the time out there and occasionally even entire airplanes with hundreds of people on board due to very rarely do people who go missing out there ever returned back to us on the land but this is the story of one guy who did and he's probably simultaneously both one of the unluckiest and luckiest people to have ever lived his name is Harrison ejecta okene a Nigerian man who in 2013 was working an ordinary job as a cook on board the ordinary tugboat Jess gone for his boat was working with a couple others late at night on the 26th of May about 32 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria in the Gulf of Guinea while they were attempting to work together stabilizing a chevron oil tanker in the rough seas a freakish big rogue wave smashed into the jasc on 4 at around 4:30 a.m. which snapped their rope and flipped the boat over it began to rapidly sink and panic set in for the 12 crew members on board most of these guys were locked inside of their cabins as a safety precaution against getting raided by pirates but while being locked inside of a cabin works well against a dude with a gun it doesn't work so well when your cabin is getting flooded with water luckily for oh Ken a however was that right before the ship flipped over he had left his cabin for the bathroom only wearing his underwear he got tossed around inside before the tiny room filled up with water he forced the door open and witnessed several of his friends get swept outside of the boats Oh Kenny got pushed out from the bathroom down the hallway into another bathroom where he managed to hang on above water for long enough until the boat hit the ocean floor 30 meters beneath the surface roughly equal to a seven story build eventually suffering from the extreme cold he managed to scramble his way out of this dangerous tiny bathroom underwater and in complete darkness unable to see or breathe he used his hands to feel ahead of him until he fantastically discovered another larger air pocket in the engineers office where he decided to stay put but almost completely naked with no food or fresh water in a cold wet room with a rapidly diminishing supply of oxygen his odds of survival were definitely very grim the pocket of air he was now trapped in was small only about 1.2 meters high and six cubic meters in volume and the death buffet that the grim reaper was offering him up was plentiful he could have died from thirst he could have died from just being too cold the water could have filled up and drowned him he could have just run out of air and suffocated or he could have gotten eaten alive by sharks who were already investigating the wreck so here's how he managed to fight off all of these multiple friend requests from the Reaper first he managed to find a few cans of coke around his area to prevent his dehydration second he discovered a mattress that he fashioned beneath him that kept part of his chest and his entire head above the cold water which helped his core continue to stay warm and prevented the onset of hypothermia if it wasn't for that lucky break the very cold water would have likely killed him within hours but his biggest problem was the tiny pocket of air that he was trapped in running out of oxygen based on the size of the pocket that he was in and the pressure that it was under 30 meters beneath the ocean his time limit for breathing was likely only around 60 hours give or take a little but there was an additional danger to him in the pocket besides simply running out of oxygen to breathe he could have also breathed out too much and pumped out too much carbon dioxide which would have poisoned himself luckily for him however is that co2 is easily absorbed by water and by splashing the water around inside he was inadvertedly increasing the water surface area which increased the rate that the co2 was getting absorbed at and so the levels never got high enough inside to become lethal and while he had to endear the sounds sharks getting in and feasting upon the corpses of his friends they luckily never managed to find him in his little pockets Oh Kenny was trapped there half in water at the bottom of the ocean in a tiny pitch-black six cubic metre space while listening to sharks eating his friends 460 incredibly grueling and frightening hours pushing the absolute limit of his limited oxygen supply when right then probably within just an hour or two of suffocating he finally heard the sound of knocking unknown to him Chevron had sent a team of divers to investigate the wreck and recover any bodies unknown to Chevron was that one of those bodies was actually still alive Oh Kenny began banging his surroundings back at them to no avail but when he finally saw the light of a diver emerge inside of the water nearby to him he knew that his time to act had come the divers only expected to find a corpse but he latched on to the arm of the next diver who passed and probably gave him the shock of his life but the risk of death for Oh Kenny wasn't even over then after being under the ocean for so long a rapid ascent back to the surface would have likely sent him into cardiac arrest and killed him so the divers equipped him with a diving helmet placed him into a diving bell and raised him back up above the ocean surface where he then had to spend two more days decompressing before finally returning back to normal reality after his real-life nightmare Oh Kenny's horrific ordeal is believed to be the longest amount of time that any human being has ever survived for underwater without the assistance of any diving equipment he says that he continues to have nightmares about the incident and he has vowed to never again return to the ocean for the rest of his life fear of the ocean like that is known as the lasso phobia and if you can relate and don't really feel like visiting the ocean and I've got a great way that you can still learn a ton about the ocean anyway from the comfort of --home curiosity stream it's a documentary streaming site with thousands of top quality films including literally dozens on the ocean like oceans of the future with Sigourney Weaver or deep ocean by David Attenborough but best of all is that you can get access to all of that for an entire year for just $19.99 let that sink in for a moment an entire year of access for only $19.99 that's the exact same price as this baby back ribs at Applebee's except instead of having messy sauce all over you you get a year of access to incredible documentary films Plus that will also include access to nebula the streaming site started by myself and a bunch of other independent creators that has tons of awesome original content that you won't find anywhere else that includes all recent real life lore videos at free as well as my car show where you can see my face reviewing stuff and sharing my driving experiences with cars like a Ferrari 488 or a Lamborghini heiress you can sign up for curiosity stream right now and get access to nebula included a curiosity stream comm slash real life lore and as always thank you for watchingthis video was made possible by curiosity stream when you sign up at the link in the description you'll also get access to nebula the streaming video platform that real life lore is a part of the ocean is a huge and terrifying place but it's even more huge and terrifying when you go beneath the surface more than 80% of the world's oceans are still unmapped unobserved and unexplored meaning that if you go down on a ship you're most likely going to sink down to an area that no human being has ever before seen boats and people still go missing all the time out there and occasionally even entire airplanes with hundreds of people on board due to very rarely do people who go missing out there ever returned back to us on the land but this is the story of one guy who did and he's probably simultaneously both one of the unluckiest and luckiest people to have ever lived his name is Harrison ejecta okene a Nigerian man who in 2013 was working an ordinary job as a cook on board the ordinary tugboat Jess gone for his boat was working with a couple others late at night on the 26th of May about 32 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria in the Gulf of Guinea while they were attempting to work together stabilizing a chevron oil tanker in the rough seas a freakish big rogue wave smashed into the jasc on 4 at around 4:30 a.m. which snapped their rope and flipped the boat over it began to rapidly sink and panic set in for the 12 crew members on board most of these guys were locked inside of their cabins as a safety precaution against getting raided by pirates but while being locked inside of a cabin works well against a dude with a gun it doesn't work so well when your cabin is getting flooded with water luckily for oh Ken a however was that right before the ship flipped over he had left his cabin for the bathroom only wearing his underwear he got tossed around inside before the tiny room filled up with water he forced the door open and witnessed several of his friends get swept outside of the boats Oh Kenny got pushed out from the bathroom down the hallway into another bathroom where he managed to hang on above water for long enough until the boat hit the ocean floor 30 meters beneath the surface roughly equal to a seven story build eventually suffering from the extreme cold he managed to scramble his way out of this dangerous tiny bathroom underwater and in complete darkness unable to see or breathe he used his hands to feel ahead of him until he fantastically discovered another larger air pocket in the engineers office where he decided to stay put but almost completely naked with no food or fresh water in a cold wet room with a rapidly diminishing supply of oxygen his odds of survival were definitely very grim the pocket of air he was now trapped in was small only about 1.2 meters high and six cubic meters in volume and the death buffet that the grim reaper was offering him up was plentiful he could have died from thirst he could have died from just being too cold the water could have filled up and drowned him he could have just run out of air and suffocated or he could have gotten eaten alive by sharks who were already investigating the wreck so here's how he managed to fight off all of these multiple friend requests from the Reaper first he managed to find a few cans of coke around his area to prevent his dehydration second he discovered a mattress that he fashioned beneath him that kept part of his chest and his entire head above the cold water which helped his core continue to stay warm and prevented the onset of hypothermia if it wasn't for that lucky break the very cold water would have likely killed him within hours but his biggest problem was the tiny pocket of air that he was trapped in running out of oxygen based on the size of the pocket that he was in and the pressure that it was under 30 meters beneath the ocean his time limit for breathing was likely only around 60 hours give or take a little but there was an additional danger to him in the pocket besides simply running out of oxygen to breathe he could have also breathed out too much and pumped out too much carbon dioxide which would have poisoned himself luckily for him however is that co2 is easily absorbed by water and by splashing the water around inside he was inadvertedly increasing the water surface area which increased the rate that the co2 was getting absorbed at and so the levels never got high enough inside to become lethal and while he had to endear the sounds sharks getting in and feasting upon the corpses of his friends they luckily never managed to find him in his little pockets Oh Kenny was trapped there half in water at the bottom of the ocean in a tiny pitch-black six cubic metre space while listening to sharks eating his friends 460 incredibly grueling and frightening hours pushing the absolute limit of his limited oxygen supply when right then probably within just an hour or two of suffocating he finally heard the sound of knocking unknown to him Chevron had sent a team of divers to investigate the wreck and recover any bodies unknown to Chevron was that one of those bodies was actually still alive Oh Kenny began banging his surroundings back at them to no avail but when he finally saw the light of a diver emerge inside of the water nearby to him he knew that his time to act had come the divers only expected to find a corpse but he latched on to the arm of the next diver who passed and probably gave him the shock of his life but the risk of death for Oh Kenny wasn't even over then after being under the ocean for so long a rapid ascent back to the surface would have likely sent him into cardiac arrest and killed him so the divers equipped him with a diving helmet placed him into a diving bell and raised him back up above the ocean surface where he then had to spend two more days decompressing before finally returning back to normal reality after his real-life nightmare Oh Kenny's horrific ordeal is believed to be the longest amount of time that any human being has ever survived for underwater without the assistance of any diving equipment he says that he continues to have nightmares about the incident and he has vowed to never again return to the ocean for the rest of his life fear of the ocean like that is known as the lasso phobia and if you can relate and don't really feel like visiting the ocean and I've got a great way that you can still learn a ton about the ocean anyway from the comfort of --home curiosity stream it's a documentary streaming site with thousands of top quality films including literally dozens on the ocean like oceans of the future with Sigourney Weaver or deep ocean by David Attenborough but best of all is that you can get access to all of that for an entire year for just $19.99 let that sink in for a moment an entire year of access for only $19.99 that's the exact same price as this baby back ribs at Applebee's except instead of having messy sauce all over you you get a year of access to incredible documentary films Plus that will also include access to nebula the streaming site started by myself and a bunch of other independent creators that has tons of awesome original content that you won't find anywhere else that includes all recent real life lore videos at free as well as my car show where you can see my face reviewing stuff and sharing my driving experiences with cars like a Ferrari 488 or a Lamborghini heiress you can sign up for curiosity stream right now and get access to nebula included a curiosity stream comm slash real life lore and as always thank you for watching\n"