Bittersweet Infamy - #23 - Man in a Bubble

Episode Date: July 25, 2021

Taylor tells Josie about shipwreck survivor Harrison Okene and the sinking of the tugboat Jascon 4. Plus: a deep dive into Deep Dive Dubai, the world's deepest pool.

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I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy. The shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. This infamous is, I think, a little bit more of my personal opinion. I think it's infamous. Others may not, so I'm putting out a very opinionated infamous this time round.

As you do. That's why you have a podcast. I want those emails in my inbox. So, I am claiming that Dubai's new record-breaking, deepest swimming pool is just the shittiest thing in the world. Let me tell you why. Okay, I'm all ears. I'm all ears because you're famously, that girl was flooding that fucking dolphin house and you were all about it. You're like, this is good.

This is good material. Exactly, exactly. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, I feel like I have some almost little bit of understanding of this situation. So, the newest swimming pool. It hasn't been open to the public just to invitees, including Will Smith. It is 196 feet, making it the world's deepest swimming pool.

It is designed, it's called deep dive, and it's designed specifically for divers. So, like scuba divers with supported air supplies, or if you're a crazy free diver, then that's cool too. It is, it's like this big column that they've built, and inside of the world's deepest pool is a quote-unquote abandoned city. Is this at the Atlantis? No, I don't think so. What is the Atlantis? The Atlantis is a big hotel that does these big spectacle kind of things. I went to the one in the Bahamas when I was younger, and that was their flagship one.

But I think where they've really made their money is in Dubai, like now Dubai is the number one one, I believe. And it's a lot of these like big installations, sunken cities, world's largest saltwater this, world's most rare that, you know? Yeah, no, I don't think it's connected to that. I think it's its own entire venture, like its own. Right, okay. So they have an abandoned city, quote-unquote, a full apartment, modern apartment. Wow. Oh my god, there's a library where you can like take books out and read them? I don't know how they haven't disintegrated.

What I find so horrible about it is that it's like, it's encouraging these divers and it's banking on like go and experience an apartment just like your apartment. But now it's underwater. If you want to go, if you want to play chess, you can play chess if you want to play foosball. They have that. That's sick. Pinball. That doesn't know pool. I don't think that.

You can play foosball in the pool. Like literally. Yeah, I know. I got that. Yeah. That's clever. Yeah, I got that. I...

You can't play foosball underwater. That doesn't make any sense. Dude, they figured it out. I just, I think what I find so stupid about it is like to dive, to be certified to dive, which I am not. I'm not certified. And maybe that's why is like my idea of diving is like you get to go and explore a whole another dimension of the earth.

Like you get to see these amazing creatures or these amazing formations and like just an entire other world from what we live in. And this whole thing is like, it's just your world, but underwater. And I can't, I just can't. It's just so gimmicky. Nouveau-Riche underwater is your, is your criticism here or something? Yeah. Yeah.

I just think it's like, why would you spend all that money? Why would you spend any of your time? I mean, and maybe my thing is, is Dubai as well. Cause I know that there is a ski lift and an artificial ski mountain there that costs more than what it would probably cost to just go to the Swiss Alps and be on. Tallest building in the world is there. Yeah. Again, I am not a competitive person.

I don't give a shit. But the deep dive Dubai, it is now 50 feet deeper than the previous deep swimming pool, which was called Deep Spot in Poland. I guess you got a bank on deep. Yeah. You gotta just play to what people know it's deep. Exactly. It's 14 million liters of water and it's fresh water.

There is, it's designed so that there is a restaurant that family and friends, non-divers can eat at and watch you dive. So it's the whole. That's fun. So if you want to watch, if you want to watch your wife dive while you have a burger with the kids. Yeah. If you want to, if you want to watch her like play foosball, I don't, why not just do that?

I just. That's kind of sick. I don't watch you play foosball underwater. Not that you're my wife yet. But give it a time. You never, these stories go nuts man. Exactly. Exactly.

There are cameras all around so that security is up. There's a hyperbolic chamber on site that can hold up to 12 people in case there's any type of mistakes or incidents. Yes. And they're doing this big press release where they have invited these two, this couple who's a free diving couple. So free diving is like, you don't need the air tank. You've trained yourself and your, you know, your lungs and your brain to dive to depths

without needing air for a long time. And so they have this big campaign out where like they are wearing a suit and a dress and they're like reading books underwater and they're like taking a stroll under this like huge like main grove tree that is grown down into the, into the calm. Wow. Yeah. That's fast. I mean, it's an arresting image if nothing else.

Like you described these things and I can picture them in my head. No, it's totally arresting. It's totally aesthetically really well laid out and beautiful. But fuck them. But fuck them. Fuck them. I just, I don't know. This, this, the, the ski mountain, I'm like, okay, maybe I'm just not attached to that.

But like the diving thing, I guess I just got back from San Diego where I was like swimming in the ocean, looking at like air baldy fish and kelp and we saw dolphin when we were swimming and that was cool. And it's just like this, just whole other world we don't understand at all. And to dive into swimming it is such a treat and so amazing that then, then, then why not? Why are you not certified in diving then? That's a good question.

I don't know. I've just never really done it. I should have done it at UBC because it was, it was pretty cheap to do it as a student there. Yeah. They had the dive club there. Yeah. Yeah.

And I just didn't. They had a dive bar or two. Shouts out to the pit. Don't shout that place out. No. Kerners was better. Oh God. I'm not shouting any of this shit out of these.

Fuck them. Fuck them. That's what I say. Fuck them. Fair enough. Fuck them. You know what it's about. Yeah.

Fuck them. Fuck it. Who cares? Would you ever dive like in amongst a shipwreck? Totally. Yes. Explain. Why?

Because then I could see this element that once was above land or above water, this kind of designed for, for being on top of water, designed for being on land and you know, certain situations and seeing it shipwrecked would reveal all the ways that those, those two elements, the water and the land are in conflict. Like the dissolving of the boat or the coral that goes over it or what animals choose to live there and how to make that a space. And also if it was a shipwreck that was not placed there by somebody too, it's like, well, what happened to the people who were on the boat?

Like how did the boat go down? There's a lot of story and like wonderful things that could be happening there or horrible things. I was listening to a podcast called Outside and it was actually like around this general subject. Oh, whoa. And it was divers being like, there's, there's the kind of shipwrecks that are like the ones that you describe that are like springs of life or, or nature reclaiming or whatever.

But there's some other ones, whether it's like really deep water or really recent shipwrecks where it's different because everything's kind of recognizable as it was. And it's sort of a shadow of its former self, you know, it's eerily empty. And yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. It's a site of destruction rather than reclamation than the other one. It's a site of destruction and like not for nothing, there's usually bodies. Yeah, that's rough. And often though not always, attempts will be made to recover the corpses of those lost

so their families can stage a decent burial. This was the case in May 2013 when three South African divers, Nikolas von Herden, Daryl Osthasen, and Andrea Rasmus were hired to explore the remains of the Jaskon 4, which had sunk almost three days earlier, 20 miles off the coast of Iscravus, Nigeria, taking every crew member down with her. Yeah, that's, I don't want to be on that dive. No, thank you. And that is why I'm not certified.

Seamless integration on that Mimphemous. Ooh! Thank you. Oh! Navigating a newly sunken ship is a hell of a thing, especially when it's over 30 meters or 100 feet underwater, a figure that sounded much more impressive until I knew that they doubled it in Dubai. So that's, so in building terms, so this is actually, we can cross-reference our stories

with each other here. So that's nine stories deep in building terms. Mine, my 100 meters, not your 190, which would be double that. Yeah. For reference, professional divers are encouraged only to stay at this depth for 20 minutes at a time max for safety reasons. Deep down in the Gulf of Guinea, that's the body of water, they're in there in the Gulf of Guinea. It's completely dark, the only light is coming from the diver's headlamps,

and there's actually like footage of this on YouTube that you can see. Everything is like silty, milky green, you can barely see like an inch in front of your face. The ship is upside down, so they find themselves walking on ceilings and clambering up upside down staircases. And they find bodies. The members of the crew who tragically weren't able to escape the jazz con in time. Nico van Heerden is wearing a camera, so he can be guided remotely by the rescue team aboard his ship, the Lueck Toucan.

And this is the footage that you can find on YouTube. And you can see the moment where Nico brushes against a hand, it's blue, it's wrinkled in the water, and he's a little startled, but he realizes this is one of the bodies that we're here to collect. This is why I'm here. Yeah, yeah. And he grabs the hand and it grabs him back. The fright turns to adrenaline as the rescue team realize what has happened and scream into their radios, he's alive, he's alive, as they stare into the frightened disoriented face of Harrison Ojekba Okenne,

the man who survived on a sunken ship a hundred feet underwater for two and a half days. What the fuck? Are you kidding me? I just yelled to the mic so hard. I'm so excited. What? So we both had diving on the brain, hey? We both had living underwater on the brain.

Yeah. Well, I mean, bittersweet summer. Where are you going to live? This is the last episode of our bittersweet summer block. No, you're right. Heartbreaker. Oh, gosh. The ending of summer.

It's so, so bittersweet. It's not even the ending of summer. It's the ending of this theme block of programming we're doing. Summer carries on, man. August is going to have a lot of fire in it, I think. Anyway. Okay. So in order to tell you how Harrison got in that boat on the bottom of the ocean,

I need to tell you a bit about resource extraction in Nigeria's Niger Delta. Yes, you do. I need to know this. So the Niger Delta is a very densely populated region comprising the nine coastal districts of Nigeria. It's sometimes called the oil rivers, and at first that was because of palm oil, but more and more, it's because of oil oil. Okay.

The black stuff in Ferringale that takes over the trees. Oil. Got it. You know that monster? Okay. So this has been a source of much conflict with the local indigenous groups, the Igoni and Ija, often battling oil companies over control of the lands and the resources within them.

Yeah, totally. I'm going to put a brief pause in the story of Harrison Okene, our man underwater. Yeah. And I'm going to tell you a side story, a bittersweet side quest, if you'd like. This story is not directly related to the sinking of the Jaskon 5. However, it does set the stage around petroleum in the Niger Delta, and it also is an important and interesting story, so I wanted to tell it. In 1990, an Igoni man named Ken Saro Wewa started a movement called Mosop,

which stands for movement for the survival of the Igoni people. Mosop was comprised of 11 member organizations that is, it still exists. Mosop is comprised of 11 member organizations that use nonviolent resistance to protest for the right to indigenous self-determination around environmental and cultural issues in the Niger Delta, and it's like a very, you know, the right to indigenous self-determination over their lands and the resources on them and stuff like that is a battle that you can find in Canada and America the world over, right? It's a global but very specific thing, because each land is so different, yeah.

Mosop opposed the operating practices of the Royal Dutch Shell Company, Shell, which were supported by military dictator Sani Abacha. According to Wikipedia, this is a poll direct from Wikipedia. On May 21st, 1994, four Igoni chiefs all on the conservative side of a schism within Mosop over strategy were murdered. Ken Saro Wewa, head of the opposing faction within Mosop, had been denied entry to Igoni land on the day of the murders, but was then detained in connection with the killings. A military official blamed the killings on the quote, irresponsible and reckless thuggery of the Mosop element.

On November 10th, 1995, Ken Saro Wewa, along with eight other Igoni activists, were publicly hanged by the Nigerian government. Oh my, wait, what year was that? 1995. Ah! Yeah, the other men were Bari Nam, Kyobel, John Kapuniam, Bari Borbara, Saturday Dobie, Felix Noate, Nordu Eao, Paul Lovora, and Daniel Gaboku. The deaths were met with international outrage and economic sanctions.

Yeah. Something I read described Nigeria as a pariah state, whatever that means because of it. Yeah. So new evidence, again, this is gonna fucking shock you. New evidence suggests that the elders were killed by members of the Nigerian military, including those on the payroll of Shell. After the fact, at least two witnesses who testified that Saro Wewa was involved in the murders of the Igoni elders recanted, stating that they had been bribed in the presence of Shell's

lawyer with money and offers of jobs with Shell to give false testimony. Whoa. Like, the lawyer was there while they were like, you come work for Shell for life if you help us make this go away. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you'll be set up for life. The Wewa family sued Shell, who settled out of court for $15.5 million. USD?

I don't know. I think, that's a great question. Yeah. That's, I have no idea. A lot of money. A lot, a lot of mula. President Sani Abacha died under mysterious circumstances in 1998. He woke up dead one day and no one seemed to fuss to find out how or why.

So that's the side story done. It tells you a little bit about, like, this is the general state of affairs around oil in this part of the world. Yeah, not too hot, greedy greed. Yeah, okay. So the Niger Delta, which is like a land mass of Nigeria with rivers and such and so on, immediately, it's a delta, right? Yeah.

Immediately adjoins the Gulf of Guinea, which is like, when you see a drawing of Africa, it's right there cozy up under the little nook, you know? Long story short, there's a lot of oil being pumped in the Gulf. So because the Gulf is both an extraction and transportation point for oil, petropyracy or the stealing of oil in the Gulf of Guinea has been a reality since around 2008. Petropyracy is the better name, gotta say. I agree.

I love the term petropyracy because it is what it says, right? I kind of would like to be a petro pirate myself. I drive a Prius, so maybe I am. You might want to hold off on declaring an oath to the petro pirates until I describe them to you. Okay, maybe you're right. You can get a petro dingy and just pet around. Yeah, that's what I mean.

That's the Prius, really. There we go. The Prius of the Sea. So petropyracy most typically takes place in territorial waters because that limits the ability of international maritime organizations to investigate. Right, yeah. So it tends to be nearest the shore, right? And it affects all of the Ten Nations on the Gulf, but much of it originates from

Nigeria, not all but much. Well, Nigeria is a big country, too. So just landmass wise, you know, make sense. Or water wise. Many, at least 76, confirm pirate attacks. Many lost revenues. Many lost lives, I assume, although I couldn't find a death toll. I couldn't find a toll in lost revenues, but I won't dignify it by saying it.

Fuck it. Because who cares? Money is fake. Money is a dog out of coin. Moving along. Yeah, exactly. Security is an issue and not just because of pirates. Equipment malfunctions.

Bad weather happens. Ships break down. The sea is a cruel mistress. As we well know, as we've explored many times on this show, if anything bad happens, you've got a boat with millions and millions of dollars of oil just sitting there, right to get plucked by Neridu Wells or claimed by the sea itself. Cruel mistress that she is. In the early morning of May 26, 2013, the culprit is a storm.

A massive chevron oil tanker has just extracted a bounty of precious crude from a single buoy mooring, but it's getting shit kicked by heavy winds, rain, and waves as it attempts to navigate back to shore. So the usual protocol is employed. Three small but mighty tugboats are sent out to stabilize the tanker and guide it safely back to shore. One of these ships is the Jaskon 4, not to be confused with Jackson 5. You know, I had a moment in my head where I was like, does he mean the Jackson 5?

Oh. No, I don't. I mean the Jaskon 4. This sounds like a really bad, like, knockoff group and knockoff cover. It's like the cover band who, like, lost somebody. Like, oh yeah. Yeah, Tito went solo. Yeah, he went solo.

He got married and moved to Colorado, so now we're the Jackson 4. Yeah, now he owns a dispensary. The Jaskon 4, a small tugboat, 12-person crew, including 29-year-old Cook Harrison Okene from Wari, Nigeria. So from what I observed, these are just, these are just my personal takes. Harrison seems to be a quiet man, soft-spoken, very serious, very religious, devout Christian. Not one to crack a joke, not one to flash a smile. But I've also only ever heard him talk about this one horrible thing that happened to him,

so maybe he's a lovely, cheerful man, who knows. He has a great comedy special. He graduated university with a degree in hotel and catering management, which he parlayed into a job preparing meals aboard ships. Exciting job. Yeah, you're about to find out. It sure does get exciting around here. At 5 a.m. Harrison wakes up to prepare breakfast for the other crew members, but first he desperately

has to answer the call of nature. He gets out of bed in just his boxers, and he blindly feels his way through the darkened ship until he reaches the bathroom, or a nautical parlance. The head. Good one! The sea is very rough, but this is far from Harrison's first storm in the gulf. The waters are always getting whipped up, so he's relatively unconcerned. He's sitting on the toilet in the pitch darkness, taking care of business.

Oh, he's taking care of some business. He's not just going up for a pee. He's taking a dump. Oh, no. He's taking a shit. When all of a sudden, the entire bathroom, including Harrison, flips upside down as a rogue wave capsizes the ship in one go. Whoop!

Oh, my God. So it's just like jostle. Oh, it's kind of crazy out there, and then... Then upside down. Nothing to warn, nothing to be on your side. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. We just...

Oh, my God. A salto. Total salto. Oh, he gets it. It was a salto with a fucking triple cool whip split. It was something. A sidebar the toilet landed on his head. Not very fun.

No. In the hallway, Harrison hears one of his compatriots yell, the ship is about sinking. The ship is about sinking. Ever the optimist, Harrison says, quote, to me, I thought maybe he was joking. Oh, the toilet hit my head. But maybe he's joking. The light goes out and never turns back on. Harrison struggles to get his bearings and make his way out the door.

After some work, he's able to get the door open just in time to see three of his fellow crew members open the emergency hatch and get swept away by the waves into the raging sea. He would never see them again. The current drags him out of the room into another upside down bathroom that adjoins an officer's cabin and by clinging to a sink. So imagine upside down the way a sink is bolted to the wall. But now that's at the top of the room.

So he's able to hold on to like the pipe and the sink, right? Yeah. He's able to keep his head above water and access a four square foot pocket of air. Oh my God. Oh my God. Do you okay? Yeah, no, I'm okay. Okay.

Meanwhile, the jazz con four continues sinking until it reaches the bottom of the ocean where it comes to rest upside down on the seabed. And then emergency response team quickly scouts the situation and drops anchor near the site of the wreck. The anchor strikes the hull of the jazz con. So Harrison starts banging. He starts banging the walls where he is hoping someone will hear him. But now nobody hears him.

And the emergency dive is quickly called off due to poor conditions and no evidence of survivors. Harrison is trapped and completely alone in the belly of the jazz con for a hundred feet under the ocean surface. He's like a pitch black to like he is seeing nothing. Nothing. And he doesn't fully understand. He's probably gotten the picture on what's happening at this point, but he's probably not stoked about it.

And what do we know the temperature of the water down there? I mean, chilly. I can tell you what the surface temperature for the Gulf of Guinea is. It's I think it's like 26 or 27 degrees. Okay. But I don't, I don't know what the deep water thing. There's like a, there's like a thermocline. Yeah.

I just want to actually just jump in here and put it on the table. I am not the man you want to get your science information from. And this story has a lot of science information. Yeah. Far more than I expected. I don't know why I was that naive. Science is everywhere, Taylor. I see it over your shoulder.

Science. I learned how diving bell works. I just learned all this shit. So we're going to get certified together. Is that it? After this story, I'm going to be a maybe, but not a, not a solid maybe. You know, you never know. Okay, okay.

Divers help this man, you know. I don't want to spend time with Harrison in this unenviable situation. So let's talk about something else. And we're going to rejoin him in about 24 hours. Okay. Bye, Harrison. Good luck. I agree.

I think you can do this. So before Harrison, was there ever a case like this of someone surviving in an air pocket on a sunken ship? I could find this happening for periods of four hours or so, but I wanted someone who really stuck it out down there and didn't push out. Yeah. I wanted someone who really confronted it head on. I found a story about a dog named Cutie who survived in an air pocket and got reunited with her owners. Oh my gosh. What kind of dog was Cutie?

Cute. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's like, I've even had, I don't remember some, some kind of terrier. Some water dog. Yeah. Many stories about Harrison describe him as an accidental aquanaut, which struck me as a bit precious at first.

Yeah. Because they'd always be like, Harrison, okay, the accidental aquanaut. And I'd be like, Jesus, leave the, let the man have some dignity. But it does, it does hold water. Pardon the pun. It does hold air. It does hold air just enough. In lay terms, an aquanaut is any person who remains underwater for more than 24 hours, usually in an underwater habitat on the seafloor.

Oh, like the squirrel, Sandy the squirrel in SpongeBob SquarePants. Yeah, she's an aquanaut. Exactly. Gotcha. The first human aquanaut was Robert Sténoï. He was a Belgian man born in 1933. Unlike Harrison O'Kennay, he'd prepared for it his whole life. He cut his teeth spelunking as a teen.

Then he discovered cave diving. He searched the sea for the remains of Spanish galleons. He worked for a salvage company hunting sunken treasure on the ocean floor. Like he was a diver. Everything in his life was pointing to this, right? Yeah, yeah. And in 1962, he was chosen by a man named Edwin Link to participate in Man in Sea, an experiment where he was placed in a submersible decompression chamber and lowered 200 feet into the Mediterranean sea where he spent the next 24 hours. Whoa.

He would later become an aquatic researcher in his own right. He's still alive and active as an underwater archaeologist. Cool. So since then, there have been other examples of people deliberately staying underwater for long periods of time, monitored for research purposes. Jacques Cousteau conducted a series of underwater living experiments. For example, the US Navy, the US Navy had sea lab in the 60s. You love that shit. Yeah, I totally do.

And that's actually still, I think that's the one that's still operational for training astronauts. Oh, see, I had no idea. Actually, it's not training astronauts. It's part of NASA programming where certain astronauts are, I guess, aquanauts are sent down there. And it's like you do all the training with NASA and da-da-da-da-da-da, but instead of going to space, you go under the ocean. And they research the human body's reaction to pressurized living and underwater living and all of that. Yeah. All those people are aquanauts.

Yeah. That's different from being forced into the situation while taking your 5 a.m. shit. Yeah, agreed. So let's zoom in. Have there been any other accidental aquanauts? We need to refine this search. Yes. Boolean.

Enhance. In deference to Mr. Okene's strong Christian faith, gotta shout out the original accidental aquanaut. Jesus Christo. Jonah. There you go. You got it. You came around.

Jesus was on the water, not under the water. I forgot. Sorry. Yeah, that's true. He multiplied fish. He didn't live in them. Yes. Jonah on the other hand.

Is that what he did? Did he multiply the fish? And the loaves. So Jonah spent three long days inside of a giant fish, commonly thought to be a whale. I think it's actually a fish, but I'm not sure. I'm not your Bible guy. Right. Yeah.

So if you're unfamiliar, the story goes that God ordered Jonah to warn the city of Nineveh, of impending divine wrath. And instead Jonah blew off God and sailed in the opposite direction to Tarshish, like a total goon. You just said, fuck it. Yeah, he was, he was like, who cares? And God was like, this is probably Old Testament, man. I don't, I'm not responsible for what I do.

I don't know if it's Old Testament, I think so. A storm hit the ship, a fish ate Jonah, and he only escaped when he grudgingly agreed to Nineveh, whereupon the fish barfed him out on the shore. I love it. Classic. In Judaism, the story represents Teshava, the ability to repent and be forgiven by God. Gotta fill the hour here, folks. You didn't know we were turning into AM radio, but we did.

I love some AM radio. No, me too. That's the lie. Don't. Yeah, I don't know why I really said that. Speaking of being swallowed by sea creatures. In 1891, articles circulated claiming a man named James Bartley survived inside a whale for 36 hours before being caught and freed by a British ship, the Star of the East.

Oh, wow. While the incident made worldwide news at the time, and there was all of these embellishments about he came out and his skin was blanched to the shade of poachment, and he was blind, like all of these things, right? Many doubt it's legitimacy, including the wife of the ship's captain, Mrs. John Killam, who unfortunately existed in a time where women didn't have names. Though John Killam, Killam, John, I don't know, it just sounds like she's going to kill her husband. That's kind of cool.

Anyway, continue. Go ahead. Sorry. She said, quote, there is not one word of truth in the whale story. I was with my husband all the years he was in the Star of the East. There was never a man lost overboard while my husband was in her. The sailor has told a great sea yarn. Sea yarn.

This also comes up in that podcast Outside, which you now know I wasn't listening to recreation. Yes. They interview a diver because they're talking about, like, how does diving misinformation get spread around? And how do these tall tales of who did what get spread around? And he's like, honestly, most divers are full of shit is the answer. Most divers just love. Most divers just love telling tall tales about their dives.

And this is like immediately after he's telling this story about I dove on a World War Two shipwrecks of skeletons. Like he's just given his version of that. And then he's like, by the way, all divers are full of shit, like whatever. So take what you want. Many contemporary articles about Harrison's conundrum mention like the ones released at the time that it happened mention that in 1992, a diver named Michael Proudfoot was exploring a shipwreck in Baja, California, when suddenly his regulator, which is the mouthpiece, broke.

He panicked but was able to stow away in an air pocket for 48 hours, during which he survived by drinking fresh water from a nearby urn and eating sea urchins. Wow. Delicious. Yum. Delicious urn water and sea urchins. I only eat things that start with you are. Why?

Because you are cute. What's your number? Still bad. You really do. I still got it after all these years. Pandemic and isolation to nothing to you. That's great. No, no, no flies on me.

So my quick look into that story brought me to a podcast called Outside, which is the one I've been talking about the whole time. And it digs into the story of Michael Proudfoot, which is why I listen to it in general. When I'm doing my research for these things, I try. I don't always, but I try to avoid other podcasts because I don't want their, their telling of it to influence the way that I tell it, right? But because this one was this, this podcast is actually about this other story of Michael Proudfoot, although it does mention Harrison Okene in it because it's about the same general

subject. They, so I'm about to kind of spoil this episode of Outside for you. I apologize. It's worth listening to in its own right. Because the way that they go about it, basically they can't find any sourcing for this Michael Proudfoot story other than an Australian children's nonfiction book. Oh, it's called Disasters Across Curricular Theme. And it's one of those books.

I think I got the vibe that, you know, when you'd have those books that were all about like this one's all about dinosaurs and this one's all about scary stories and this one's all about the H the desert. Yeah. The pyramids. Exactly. It's one of those about disasters, which I imagine is very light fare in Australia where everything's trying to kill you.

Yeah. This is probably just good sense, right, to be prepared. So he, so they contact this, this book exists in this weird void where it has no known author or date of publication. But they are able to contact the publishers and be like, yo, what's the deal? And their response basically is like, we're all looking into this and we have no idea who wrote this because all of the, the factoids would have been from different people. No one would have been like sourced or whatever.

So then the way they go about it is they're like, a water ghost. The ghost of Michael Proudfoot. The ghost of the ocean. Yeah. The urchin. Urchin. Ocean. I like urchin.

Urchin. The urchin. So then they try to go about myth busting it and I don't want to ruin everything that they, they run the equations, they look at the different, they break the story back down into components and see like, could this part have happened, could this part have happened? And in the end, they can't disprove it, but they're also never able to track down Michael Proudfoot or find out any concrete evidence that this guy actually exists. Right.

So the urn, water, and urchins may never have happened. So what does that mean? It means that if anyone other than Harrison Okenne survived for a long period of time in an air bubble in a shipwreck, like over 24 hours, their luck ran out before they were discovered. Yep. Okay. Okay, back to Harrison.

It's been 24 hours, although Harrison has no way of knowing that. He's trapped in the dark on an upside down underwater ship. He's disoriented. He's hungry. He's thirsty. He's freezing cold. He's frightened and confused. His survival is nothing short of astounding,

given the many factors working against him. He wasn't, he wasn't even in the bathroom that he was taking a shit in either, right? He like got swept into this other bathroom. So he did manage to get swept into this other bathroom, but so this is something, if you're wondering why I laid all of that tracking about petropiracy and all of this stuff earlier when it didn't seem directly relevant. So apparently, the, because they were so worried about pirates, the protocol was one, lock this shit up tight as a fucking drum,

and then two, everyone locks themselves into their rooms to sleep. Oh, wow. Harrison was the only one who wasn't locked into his room when the ship flipped over. When the ship flipped over, yeah. Exactly. So the theory is that that has everything to do with why Harrison specifically happened to survive

because he happened to get up at 5 a.m. to take a shit. Yeah. And everyone else was locked into their bedrooms because every door is made of solid steel and bolted five fucking times before anyone does anything because not so much because people are so very concerned about the crew, although I'm sure that too, but like, because there's, this is, this is to do with oil.

Right. So we can't have this money fucked with, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just going to give you a nice little roll call of everything that could conceivably kill this man in this situation. What is your, what are you thinking? What are your concerns in this situation if you're him?

Well, first I have a question. The entire top of the bathroom itself, which used to be the bottom, but now it's the top. Which is the floor, yes. Yeah. Is the air. That is air. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. So it's not something like a sink that he can, or something like that. It is the actual, the room. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

The room is the air pocket. Okay. So what are your concerns? My concerns running out of air that he would fill up with CO2. That's number two. Beauty. Let's go. What else you got?

He has to hold himself onto the, or he had like, yeah, keep his head above water by holding up. Totally just get tired, fall asleep, drown or black out. Yep. He might panic and try, panic and do any number of things, which would include breathing too much air, or I guess the one I'm thinking of now is that he would try and leave and find a way out, not knowing how deep he probably was.

Yep. There's one, there's one, one big one that you're missing, and it has to do with something that we chatted about earlier. Is it sharks? Sharks are in the, sharks are in the equation, but it's not sharks. It's not sharks. Food.

There's no urctions around. Yep. No, food, food, yes, water, yes. These are all relevant concerns as well. I was going for hypothermia. Oh yeah, the temperature. Yeah, of course. He'd be chilly as fuck.

Yeah. Here's what's up with all of these concerns. Let me, let's break down some numbers. 11 number that's broken. This is the science shit that I apologized for earlier. So you may be thinking that Harrison's biggest concern is oxygen deprivation, and that's not a negligible problem. Okay.

The average person inhales 350 cubic feet of air every 24 hours. Okay. This is like four cubic feet. Yeah. However, the deeper, the deeper into water you go, the more pressure the water applies to gases, which means the more oxygen can be compressed into a small amount of space.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Science. Science. Specifically, if you want a little fun fact, it's like 33 feet, the pressure doubles. So in Harrison's case, the pocket probably has about four more, four times more oxygen than a similar space would at sea level. Okay, okay.

Yeah, that makes sense. But it's still a finite supply. And if Harrison can't find more oxygen soon, he's going to be in bad shape. The real danger here, if we're talking respiration, which we are always. Because talking involves respiration. Yeah.

That's true. He nailed it. The possibility of carbon dioxide poisoning. Yes. As Harrison breathes in and out, he replaces more and more of the gas in the bubble with carbon dioxide or CO2. When you take in a lung full of air and hold your breath,

the reason that you get that burning in your chest and need to exhale isn't because you've depleted the oxygen in the breath. It's because you have too much CO2 in your lungs and then consequently in your blood. Okay, yeah. The more air Harrison breathes, the more CO2 he ingests,

and every breath having a tiny bit more, that means he'll need to breathe faster to get rid of it, which in turn invites more CO2 into his system, exponential growth. Yeah. His chest will ache, his diaphragm will spasm, he will become delirious. And if the carbon dioxide in Harrison's air bubble

reaches 5%, the saturation, he will die. 5%, that's nothing. It's not a lot of percent. Yeah, I really don't know what that number means, but it's a low number. It's less than six. It's fucking tiny. Know how old I am?

Not five. Those are comparable, right? Hypothermia, also an imminent danger. Yeah. Gulf of Guinea is pretty warm, but that obviously decreases with that. Yeah. Buy a lot too.

It's not dive in the ocean, and you're not a free diver. You can still feel it. Pretty easy, yeah. Yeah, of course. Still, there are worse places to sink than off the coast of Nigeria, like off the coast of Siberia.

So Harrison must be fine, right? Wrong. Stupid Josie, you're wrong. I know. Sorry. It's okay, it's okay. I don't think you're stupid. I think you're one of the brightest people I know.

Okay. Let me tell you about warm water hypothermia. Wait, warm water hypothermia? Oh yeah, you're not safe in the water. If you live forever in your infinity pool with the dolphin, you will die. No! Of hypothermia.

Eventually. If you don't get out. Oh my god. So according to an article in online, scuba magazine, Aquavuse, aka the science is theirs, any time a body is in an environment that's colder than 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit,

which is 37 Celsius, heat is lost. So you're always losing heat. Yeah, yeah, okay. And since the heat loss in water is 20 times faster than to air, this may occur fairly quick. So there is mild hypothermia,

which takes place while the core temperature is still above 90 Fahrenheit, which is 32 Celsius. Anything below that is severe hypothermia. The lowest your core temperature can drop before you die is 68 Fahrenheit, 20 Celsius. In other words,

yet another hourglass for Harrison. Fuck dude. And hey, let's talk about the bends. What do you know about the bends? Um, it was a Radiohead album. In the early 2000s. Um, perfect. It's when the air in your,

no, no, no. It's like you're not getting enough oxygen in your blood, right? It's, yeah, it's something like that. So basically the, the gist of it is if Harrison, even if Harrison survives all of this. Yeah, he could still get,

oh yeah, it's like when you go up too fast, you get the bends. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So even if he survives this, he still needs to get out from this fucking air bubble, right?

He needs to go back to the surface. If you ascend to the surface rapidly from the atmospheric pressure of deep water, because as we've said, there's more pressure down there, right? Yeah. The nitrogen gas in your body expands, creating bubbles in your blood.

There we go. I knew it was a bubble blood situation. I just didn't know which type of bubble. You turn into a little, a little fizzy drink, a little Tahiti treat. As adorable as that sounds, in mild cases,

this can result in rashes and joint pain in more severe cases. You're looking at paralysis, neurological damage, cardiac impairment, and death. Yeah baby, don't stutter. That one is the big D.

The big D, the deeper you are, and the longer you've been there, the more time you need to safely return to the surface. Right. And that's what a hyperbolic chamber does, right? It provides that pressure

and alleviates it. I think hyperbaric. Hyperbolic, dude. Hyperbolic is like a braggy chamber. So eventually, Harrison decides that he needs to move. He's worried that if he stays in this air pocket, he won't survive.

So he plucks up his courage and dives into the cold, dark water beneath him. Dark as in, darker than the inside of a boot. Like dark, dark, dark, dark, dark. He can't see anything. Yeah. Inside of a boot at the bottom of the ocean.

That's how dark. Yeah. This is inside of a boot as significantly less dark. I don't know what I was thinking. So by feeling his way around underwater, he's able to swim over to an engineer's cabin, and he gets lucky

and finds another air bubble there. Oh, my fucking shit. Are you kidding me? So he's on air bubble number two. This restarts the clock as far as oxygen depletion and carbon dioxide saturation. And there's cookies there. There is a single bottle of Coke.

Oh, M.J. babies. What? Which I mentioned that to Adam, and he's like, that's a fucking ad. And I'm like, oh, isn't it just even a hundred feet under the fucking Gulf of Guinea, you can still get a Coke and it tastes so great.

That first sparky sip. Well, the problem actually is that Harrison's tongue got eaten away by the saltwater in the atmosphere, so I bet that actually burnt like a bitch. What do you mean it got eaten away? Like you didn't have a tongue anymore? Or did it just dried up so much?

It was raw, and it was like, because he's been swimming around in saltwater, he's probably taken in a couple lungs full because he fucking flipped upside down on a ship. Yes, okay. Yeah, and then put a Coke on that and it's like iodine on a wound. Fair enough.

But you got the sweet and the salty, I don't know, pretty bitter sweet. That's true. Bitter sweet. This is a pretty bitter sweet situation. This might just be a bitter situation. So when he gets into this cabin, he is able to create a platform

to elevate himself halfway out of the water. Oh, wow. So how big is this air pocket? Like, do we know? I think it's roughly the same size. Okay. Yeah, about this. Four by four by four.

Okay. I don't know. Is that four cubic feet? I really don't understand anything. Cubes or squares? Difficult. Famously, cubes are famously difficult shapes to know anything about.

The Rubik's Cube? That's impossible. Madness. Madness. Only great minds. So he strips some of the wall paneling and uses the material along with him. I think he maybe found some tools,

but he also mentions pulling some stuff down by hand. Okay. And he gets a mattress and he's able to kind of band them together to create a small platform to hang onto. And this was instrumental in slowing his heat loss. So this is why he didn't die of hypothermia as he was able to kind of halfway pull himself up

out of the water. And apparently that was like really, really helpful. And probably two to get your organs, you know, like your vitals out of the water too. Because if your legs are really cold, if your limbs are really cold, that's okay. And your core gets that cold. Core, yeah, your heart.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I bet. So he also gets into the habit of splashing around the water in the room. And I'm not, I never figured out why he did that. My guess is for warmth or something, just like splash, splash, splash. Okay, yeah.

But apparently, so splashing the water creates more surface area for the water to absorb the carbon dioxide in the air pocket. How the hell did he fucking know that? Thereby keeping the rate of saturation below that critical fatal 5% figure. Holy shit. So survival tip.

Survival tip to anyone out there. If you ever find yourself in this grim situation, you're going to want to do some splashing around. Keep that CO2 moving, get it absorbed back into the water. This, I'm, it's being filed away. I got it in there now. Boom, never forget. You're going to forget this by the time we hang up this bottle.

Oh, totally. But that's okay. Between now and then I'm totally prepared. Yeah, exactly. So from there, Harrison waits in hellish pitch black agony, completely divorced from the passage of time. The, uh, those cold salty water removes the skin from his tongue. The air is full of unsettling noises,

the shriek of the hull as it pops and compresses. Yeah, I'm sure that boat is making a lot of noise as it comes apart. That boat is due in the fucking Harlem Shake down there. It's spraying nuts and bolts everywhere and making horrible haunting ghost noises as it does so. And one of those could just pop the little bubble too. No problemo.

Who knows? Imagine the psychological thing of like the sounds of that. Yeah, what the fuck is that? What the fuck is that? Is that someone saving me? Is that something terrible happening? He hears the occasional screams and pleas of crewmates who also found air bubbles, which one by one go silent.

Oh fuck, no, what? Yeah, yeah. Followed by the grim splashes of their bodies getting eaten by sharks, fish, and other marine life. What? Oh my gosh. And eventually he smells the pungent odor of his shipmates rotting corpses being claimed by the ocean.

Oh, yeah, that happens fast. Oof. Yeah, the ocean is a cruel mistress. Very cruel. So, stuck in the dark. Harrison has nothing to do but think and pray, says Harrison. I thought of my family, my mom, my brothers, my wife.

I have no access to them, no way to get to them. And I'm right in the water and I know I'm going to die. But the only thing I put my hope and trust and my confidence in is God. At first he's panicked, shouting, quote, Jesus, Jesus, help me. I do not deserve this. My wife cannot be a widow at this time. Which makes me laugh because of the phrase

my wife cannot be a widow at this time. Very, very to the point. He tells it better than I do. He's funny because he's so serious. As he's talking about not wanting his wife to be a widow, Jesus. You gotta find the humor somewhere, you know. You do, you do. And he's okay.

We'll get to it, we'll get to it. He's able to reach some semblance of peace, reasoning that God has never failed him. And if he's to die in this situation, then it's God's will. He seems to have like really gone through like the kind of textbook five stages of grief down there. Because at one point I remember him saying like, you can't do this to me, God.

I never had children. I was supposed to have children, which is like a bargaining kind of thing, you know. Well, then the anger as well too, you know. Yeah, of course. Like I don't, I'm sure that this man is devout and faithful and all of that. But there has to be at least one moment down there where you're like, God, why me? What did I do?

Yeah, help me, I do not deserve this. My wife cannot be a widow at this time. Yeah, yeah. Dude. At this time, we've got shit schedules. We had those reservations. Yeah, we're going to a new restaurant on Sunday. We go dancing together.

I have to say, I don't know if you remember this, Taylor, but when I was living in Vancouver, I lived in this big shared house and I got trapped in a bathroom. Do you remember that? Remind me. I was coming home from school and I rode my bike that day and it was really, I was hot and I was sweaty as out of breath and I really had to pee so I was like booking it

and I like get into the back gate. I throw my bike on the yard and I run into the house and then there's that little tiny half bathroom at the front and it just has a sink and the toilet. I remember that. And it's also where we kept the kitty litter, the cat box. Yeah, oh, that's a great place to get stuck. It was really gross and the handle, it was this old house

and had these crystal, beautiful handles, but this one was really finicky. And I rush in and I slam the door shut because there's five other people living there. I want to shut the door when I pee and I go pee. It's great. I'm sweaty. I can't wait to be done and get out and go get my bike, blah, blah, blah.

And then I go for the handle and I turn it and I'm like, and I can see that it's like it's not giving. It doesn't have the weight that it should because it's not connected to the handle on the other side. And I don't pull it because I'm like, once I pull it, then it's done. So I'm trying to like maybe maneuver it, but eventually I pull it out and I am trapped in this bathroom with the cat box.

I am sweaty. I don't have my phone. I like threw off my bag on my way to the bathroom. I live with five other people and yet no one is home. This is so rare. Somebody was always fucking around. Always. You could never have any privacy except for when you're trapped

in the fucking bathroom. And I like, I did not handle myself as well as Harrison. I was quickly bargaining with God. I took off all my clothes. I like, how long were you in there? Two and a half hours. That's, that's pretty long to be stuck in a bath. It's pretty long.

But listening to Harrison being trapped in a. Yeah. Now imagine, now imagine the bathrooms upside down a hundred feet underwater and the toilet lands on your head. I was just thinking like, yeah, Harrison's smart. Like, yeah, I might do the same thing. I might survive that. And I was like, wait, I was in a not even similar situation

and I flipped. And then when the sun started going down, I would, I thought, oh, um, oh, that was the other thing. There was a small window, but the landlord had put a padlock on it because it was on the ground floor. So I couldn't get out of that. So when the sun went down, I started flipping the light on enough, hoping that a neighbor would see me.

Did you, did you do an SLS? I don't know how. It's, it's, uh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. Well, I didn't do that. I just flipped it was, help me. Help. Hello. Hello.

And this high school basketball player heard me and was like, hello? What? And then somebody was finally there. And I was like, oh my gosh. I was like the front door because it was right next to the front door and it was unlocked. And I was like, the front door is unlocked.

I'm stuck in this room. Can you just come in? And this poor kid like opens the door and our place is a trashy trash. And of course I don't have any clothes on. So I've asked him to come into the house. I'm like, oh wait, wait, wait, wait. And so I have to put on all my clothes. Cause you took off all your clothes on a moment of panic.

And I put on my clothes and only later did I realize I put my leggings on inside out. And he opens the door for me. And I, he must have, I don't know even know what that kid must have thought because I was just batshit. I was just like, oh my God, thank you so much. I've been in here for two and a half hours and no one's here. I just told him my entire life story.

And then I was like, I'm thank you so much. Do you want a drink? Like, I don't know. What do you, you know, like, can I help you? Offer a high school or a drink? I'm like, he probably wants one, right? And he's like, no, I should get home. My mom has dinner ready and then he leaves and I'm just like,

I'm so, I'm like so thirsty for human interaction. So I one, I go outside, big open space. And two, I like call everybody in my phone and tell them the entire story. But like, it's fucking wild. Yeah. I would not fare as well as Harrison. No, you couldn't, you couldn't keep your clothes on in a regular bathroom.

You're done. There was cat litter, but. So Miss, Miss Mitchell might have survived the, the, the dingy was only taking on water. It hadn't even fully deflated yet, but she, she immediately started panicking and screaming and stripping. Oh gosh. If you do find yourself in this situation, you may like Harrison.

You may take solace in Psalms 54 to 92, which he apparently read immediately before using the washroom. His wife, Ak Pavona had texted them to him. And they said it reads in part, oh God, by your name save me, the Lord sustains my life. So he's down there doing some Psalms. Not, it's probably in his head because his tongue is pretty gnarly, but he's doing some Psalms.

So this is like a little amusing side note. And I don't know the exact details, but when Harrison's boat sank, Ak Pavona, who is, by the way, Harrison's complete opposite, lively, chatty, it seems to think everything's a hilarious joke, even when she's talking about her husband almost dying. Cute, lover, lover. Yeah. No, I like her.

I liked Ak Pavona and I like her name. I was kind of caught in my head. I was like, Ak Pavona, that's very musical. She, so she was just like sitting some exam, so she like turned her phone off. Okay. And then she just like kind of had like some sort of vague phone issue for the next few days. Yeah, she ran out of credit or there was something.

Yeah, she couldn't, she couldn't get any incoming calls or place any herself. I don't know what the deal was. So with that in mind, the family simply chose not to tell her. So the entire time this was happening, I don't think Ak Pavona even knew until it was over. That is a wonderful gift. Wow. I think it was, it's funny because Harrison's brother only ever referred to her as the wife. So I think it was maybe just, let's not get the wife involved in this until we have to.

John Killham, yeah. John Killham, right. It's now more than 48 hours since the jazz con four capsized. The boat's parent company, West African Ventures, contracts a salvage diving vessel, the Luwak Toucan, which I mentioned at the beginning, to reclaim the bodies of the 12 crew members. They face a tremendous struggle, the tugboat. So when the tugboat landed on the seabed, it landed in soft mud. Oh.

Which really whipped up a lot of debris in the water and compromise visibility. Yeah. But it also may have made it so that the boat didn't break any more than it already had to. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Although I gather that these vessels, these little tugboats that are tension towing oil tankers, they're little brick shit houses. Yeah, none of that. And they're really, like I say, they're also like, everything is thick steel and locked to within an inch of its life, right?

Yeah. So unfortunately, that means that the dive team is forced to spend hours breaking in through multiple metal doors in order to access the ship, which is obviously time consuming and dangerous work. Yeah. Meanwhile, back in the engineer's room, Harrison hears the noises of divers banging on the hull for the first time since the initial rescue effort. So he's losing it. Yeah. He brings back on the wall, but they don't hear him.

He sees, like, through the water, through a door, he sees the headlamp flicker as one of the divers passes. Yeah. They don't reach him. They're going the other way. They're going to another room. And he's, like, calling out for them banging on the wall. Nobody hears them. Da, da, da, da.

Finally, the three divers enter the engineer's room. Harrison grabs Niko's hand and gets discovered. Oh my God. So they're able to communicate with each other through signals. They warm him up with hot water. I'm not sure how they got the hot water to him. They fit him with an oxygen mask, which they spent about 20 minutes getting him used to. They give him a diving helmet and harness, and they start swimming out to a nearby diving bell.

So how diving bells work is they have a consistent, as we've been talking about it, hyperbaric, hyperbolic, whatever you want to call it. Like a doshess. Got it. Who can say? Yeah. Elegant. All of them. They have a consistent internal pressure, and then when they reach the surface, they can be attached to a decompression chamber where the pressure can be gradually decreased, which prevents the bends, which is the nitrogen expanding in your blood thing.

The divers are able to get him into the bell and back to the surface. He passes out on the way up. Because why the fuck wouldn't you pass out after all that? Yeah, you'd want to pass out the whole time, but couldn't. So, yeah. And he spends a further two and a half days in this chamber slowly decompressing. Two and a half days. Which has to be mind numbingly dull when all you want to do is like, let me sniff a flower.

Yeah, really? Let me touch my wife's hair. She has nice hair, like fucking anything. Not this, not another different weird small room. And the nitrogen's in my blood all fucked up, and the sink fell on my head, the toilet. What big is the chamber? Like, can he get up and move, or is it just like an MRI scanner kind of size thing? I don't know.

I get the sense that it's like a small room. Okay, yeah. With rudimentary stuff, like maybe a table in there, and maybe some sort of sleeping setup. But like, not large at all. There's this one photo of Harrison with the three divers who rescued him in this chamber, and they're all just like, way, and Harrison just looks like. Like, he's like... No.

Like, he's just like, I don't know if I got this selfie in me boys, but you guys go ahead. Not having it. So Harrison arrived at sea level on Tuesday, May 28th. He sunk on Sunday. Oh my gosh. In the end, he spent 60 hours, nearly three days, aboard the sunken jazz con for. What? He had no concept of how long he'd been down there.

He thought he was like, oh, I've only been trapped 12 hours. It's still Sunday evening. Oh, whoa. Yeah. Yeah. Because you know, it's all just, I've been down in the dark for a while. I've been ebbing in and out of consciousness. Yeah, totally.

I just suffered a head injury when a toilet fell on me. And so. I'm glad he didn't think it was the other way too, where he was like, I've been down there for three weeks. You know what I mean? Like. I can see how it would feel like three weeks at points. Exactly.

Exactly. Still the same old air pocket. Yeah. This sucks. The bodies of 10 of his crewmates were recovered. The 11th was never found. I wasn't able to find names for the deceased in any of the articles I read. I don't think they were ever publicly reported, except that they included 10 Nigerians and

the Ukrainian captain. I saw mention that some of the Nigerians who had died were students at some kind of local maritime, something or other, but I know names. So Harrison didn't actually attend the funerals because he was afraid of upsetting the grieving families. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah.

He didn't want to show up and be like the one who survived and, you know, take attention or to take any of that grieving process away. Upon resurfacing, he faced a bunch of struggles to readjust as you might imagine. Some members of his religious community suspected him of using black magic to stay alive underwater. What? I was just thinking like, dude, he's the chosen one. He's like Neo. He's the living miracle, right?

He's Jonah. Exactly. Why you gotta turn all black magic on him? Well, so apparently there were like a lot of like people just in the community whispering about this, which is like the poor fucking guy. Give him a break. I had a, I had a bottle of Coke. Yeah.

Yeah. To this day, he still suffers from nightmares and PTSD. He wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, insisting that the bed is sinking and Acpovona needs to calm him down. But in the end, he considers himself, as you said, blessed by God and his survival a miracle. He did. One of the sources that I use for this is he did an interview with some like kind of Christian talk show in Nigeria that's got a name like Heart of the Matter, and it's just him.

It's just him kind of telling the story. He still works as a cook. Nice. Although now he only takes jobs on dry land. Okay. There you go. Says Harrison, quote, when I was underwater, I told God, if you rescue me, I will never go back to the sea again.

Never. Never. He's kept his word. He seems a very trustworthy, trustworthy man when it comes to watery situations. Listen, God, if you let me out of this jam, I'm never coming back to the ocean again. It's going to be hard for me to give up. You know, I've made a lot of good memories here, but I'm willing to make the sacrifice of never getting near a fucking ship ever again.

If you just give me a hand, pinky, pinky, bro. And that also marks a watery grave for bittersweet summer. We'll see you again in two weeks. Like usual. Yeah, dude. Summer, if we weren't playing a little hard to get, that's good, you know, put that on the spot. No, you didn't.

Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts. We usually release new episode every other Sunday, and you can also find us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. And if you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review or just tell a friend. Thanks. A lot of sources for this week's story. The articles I read included Undersea Miracle, How Man and Sunken Ship Survived Three Days

by Mark Lyonia for live science December 4th, 2013. Harrison Ojekba Okenne survives three days at bottom of Atlantic, rescued after finding air pocket in tugboat by the Associated Press December 3rd, 2013. Pirate Hotspot, The Gulf of Guinea by Scott Baldoff on February 28th, 2012 in the Christian Science Monitor. Warm Water Hypothermia, Aqua Views, May 27th, 2010. I listened to the August 6th, 2020 episode of the podcast Outside, entitled Trapped Under Water and Running Out of Air.

I watched the episode of Heart of the Matter on which Harrison appeared, which has since been removed from YouTube. Sorry to say, so good luck. And I watched the video I was Trapped Underwater for three days by the Infographics show on YouTube, August 26th, 2019. I also read the following six Wikipedia articles, Petropiracy in the Gulf of Guinea, Movement for the Survival of the Igoni People, Igoni Nine, Wee-Wah vs. Royal Dutch Shell Company, Aquanaut and James Bartley.

Thanks so much for joining us for the bittersweet summer. If you liked the weekly pace, let us know and if you liked the more leisurely bi-weekly pace, let us know that. The song you're listening to is called T-Suite by Brian Steele.