The man who lived for two days trapped in a wreck underwater

On May 26, a tugboat sank 20 miles (32 kilometers) off the coast of Nigeria. Of the 12 crew members on board, divers confirmed 10 deaths.

Okene told Reuters in his hometown of Warri in the Niger Delta, Nigeria's oil-producing region, that Okene was in the bathroom at 4:50 a.m. that morning when the tugboat began to tip over. He opened the bathroom door and rushed out. Okene said: "I ran out of the toilet, and it was pitch black around me, so I felt my way to the exit. Three people were ahead of me and suddenly the sea water came rushing in and swept them away one by one, and I knew that it was inevitable for them."

Okene was swept by the water along the corridor into another bathroom attached to the command cabin. The ship hit the ocean floor.

Trapped in the cold water, breathing in bubbles from an overturned tugboat on the ocean floor, the ship's cook, Harrison Okene, thought he must surely die here.

The doomed Okene found a four-foot (1.2 m) high area near the bathroom and bedroom ceiling that was not flooded. He stayed there until two South African divers rescued him two days later. One other crew member was nowhere to be found.

"I stayed in the dark water, thinking I would not survive. I thought the water would come in quickly, but that didn't happen," Okene says. His skin peeled off after two days in the salt water.

"I was so hungry and thirsty that the seawater faded my tongue," he says only the seawater kept pouring into his mouth.

In the four-foot-square bathroom, Okene, clad only in his underwear, spent more than a day clutching the buckled sink. He even plucked up the courage to swim to the bedroom, where he removed the boat deck to use it as a lifeboat to surface.

He wasn't alone in the darkness. Two days later, he was eventually rescued.