Deliverance by Prayer

"Oh God, by your name, save me ... The Lord sustains my life."
"I was dazed and everywhere was dark as I was thrown from one end of the small cubicle to another."
"I started calling on the name of God ... I started reminiscing on the verses I read before I slept. I read the bible from Psalm 54 to 92. My wife had sent me the verses to read that night when she called me before I went to bed."
Harrison Odjegba Okene, Nigeria

AP Photo/DCN Diving     In this image made available Tuesday Dec. 3, 2013, Harrison Odjegba Okene looks in awe as a rescue diver surfaces into the air pocket which has kept Okene alive for nearly three days. Recorded by the diver's headcam video the full impact of the miraculous encounter becomes plain to see. 

"The diver acknowledged that he had seen the hand and then, when he went to grab the hand, the hand grabbed him!"
"It was frightening for everybody. For the guy that was trapped because he didn't know what was happening. It was a shock for the diver while he was down there looking for bodies, and we [in the control room] shot back when the hand grabbed him on the screen."
"He was incredibly lucky he was in an air pocket but he would have had a limited time [before] ... he wouldn't be able to breathe anymore."
Tony Walker, project manager, DCN Diving

AP Photo/DCN Diving  In this image made available Tuesday Dec. 3, 2013, The hand of Harrison Odjegba Okene stretches through the murky waters to reach a rescue diver as the diver's headcam video records the moment he becomes aware that Okene is still alive after nearly three days underwater.

It is hardly possible to imagine how one could survive such an ordeal. A man, the only one to survive a tugboat sinking upended to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, caught in an air pocket that allowed him to breathe, avoiding the immediate fate that took the others, drowning in those black, cold waters. He was alone, in the dark, underwater for 72 hours, at a depth of 30 metres.

The tugboat Jascon 4 had a dozen crew on board, all drowned but Harrison Okene. It was his fate to be marooned deep in the dark waters with just his imagination for company and his faith to keep him sane. His survival is credited to his having come upon an air pocket which gave him a supply of oxygen just about to expire.

Mr. Okene, a Nigerian cook on the tugboat, was dressed only in shorts, and as the temperature dropped to freezing he was anything but comfortable, but he recited the last psalm his wife had sent him by text message and that gave him comfort, for it was called the Prayer for Deliverance. And he believes that he was ultimately saved from death because of his faith, because a higher power responded.

The plight of the tugboat's sinking caused authorities to alert a dive crew working for the Dutch company DCN Diving who had been working on a neighbouring oil field. They had recovered four bodies, when one of the crew came across a hand, much like the others he had pulled in, lifeless, only this hand, unlike the others, responded when he grasped it in his own gloved hand.

Shock and fear was the initial impression instantly replaced by disbelief and joy on the part of the man who would rescue Mr. Okene, himself almost disbelieving that rescue had occurred. The meeting between the two, the diver and the doomed, was video-recorded by the camera on the helmet of the diver. It was such an incredible, moving story that The Associated Press prevailed upon DCN Diving to release the video.

The dreadful ordeal began for Mr. Okene on May 26 around 4:30 a.m., when he was in the washroom of the tug, one of three towing an oil tanker in Nigeria's oil-rich Delta. Mr. Okene felt a sudden lurch, and then the tugboat went over on its keel and sank. In the dark he felt his way out of the washroom, opening doors, wondering what had happened to the crew. He found a cabin, felt as safe there as under the circumstances might have permitted.

He assumed that the Ukrainian captain, four cadets from Nigeria's Maritime Academy and other Nigerians would have secured themselves into their cabins. This represented standard procedure in an area of the maritime world where pirates are well known to ply their trade. At that point he likely hadn't an idea of the full picture of what had occurred. He did become aware of the sounds of shark or barracudas, and he imagined them to be eating and competing with one another over some catch.

The water began to rise in his cabin, and he constructed a rack atop a platform, piling several mattresses on top. And this is how he spent three days of agonized waiting, waiting for something to happen. His life to end, as it most certainly would have as the oxygen he was trapped with began to wane. The prospects would not have appealed to anyone; drowning or asphyxiation; much difference between the two?

He had prepared himself to die. And then he heard a boat engine and an anchor dropping. But while he had faith in God, he had no faith that the divers would be attentive to his situation. It might take a miracle, he felt, for a rescuer to find him, having to go through the sizeable boat, looking for bodies. He took his own rescue action at that point, stripping the wall of the cabin to its steel, knocking on it with a hammer he had found when he first, days earlier, stumbled through the boat looking for haven.

And then the miracle took shape.

AP Photo/DCN Diving    In this image made available Tuesday Dec. 3, 2013, Harrison Odjegba Okene, 2nd left, poses with members of the DCN Diving team who saved his life after being trapped for three days underwater.