Trapped in a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean, Harrison Okene’s immediate future looked decidedly bleak. Alone in the cold and dark, he could hear the macabre sounds of sea creatures gnawing at the bodies of his crewmates.

As the sole survivor of a tragic accident, Okene’s hopes for rescue were slim. But incredibly he lived to tell the tale. His story will blow your mind.

On May 25, 2013, tugboat the Jascon 4 was engaged in towing operations 18 miles off Nigeria’s Delta State. As its crew of 12 went to bed that evening they locked their cabin doors as a precautionary measure against pirates.

Those doors would never open again. At around 5:00 a.m. the following morning a heavy swell overwhelmed the vessel. It quickly capsized, plunging into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

Most of the crew perished. Unable to escape from their cabins, they soon succumbed to a watery grave. However, fate had a different plan in store for Okene, the ship’s cook. By the time the accident occurred he was already up and in the bathroom.

“I was dazed,” he later told Nigerian newspaper The Nation. “Everywhere was dark as I was thrown from one end of the small cubicle to another.”

The Jascon 4 sank to the seabed 100 feet below the waves. In the dark Okene felt his way around, trying to locate a safe space. Eventually he found a pocket of air in the engineer’s office. Cold and alone, wearing only boxer shorts, he could do nothing except hope that rescuers would arrive.

As the water level rose the cook constructed a makeshift platform from two mattresses. However, while he bought himself some time the two torches he had found would fail, and he had only a solitary can of Coca-Cola on which to survive.

As the hours ticked by Okene was alone with his thoughts. He wondered if he would ever see his wife Akpos, his mother and his friends ever again.

The cook also thought of his crewmates – could any have survived? When he heard sharks and barracudas swimming through the vessel, fighting over what sounded like chunks of flesh, he knew the answer.

“At that point I was very scared,” Okene explained. Sure that he would also soon die, he once again thought of his wife, her becoming a widow and the fact that they had not yet had any children.

But despite his predicament Okene’s life was not in immediate danger. A combination of strange coincidences meant that the cook, against all the odds, was able to survive.

Because the cabin was located on the ocean floor beneath several meters of water, the pressure was high. That meant that oxygen in the cabin had been compressed, giving Okene enough to last him around 60 hours. By splashing around the cook unwittingly increased the surface area of the water around him, thus making it easier for carbon dioxide to be absorbed.

Okene also managed to fight off hypothermia by keeping himself above the water level. But despite his relative good fortune the brave survivor was running out of time.

After spending two-and-a-half days submerged Okene recognized the distant sound of a boat’s engine. And when he heard an anchor drop and paddling divers he knew that a rescue mission was underway. Unfortunately it wasn’t guaranteed to succeed.

How would the rescuers know which part of the boat Okene was in? There was only one thing for it: the cook decided to dive into the painfully cold water to make himself seen. Once he was submerged he swam towards a torch light.

Diver Nico van Heerden must have had the fright of his life when Okene’s hand reached out from the gloom towards him. He initially assumed it belonged to a corpse, but then he realized that this man was very much alive.

With the help of an oxygen mask and a rope, a traumatized Okene was placed into a decompression chamber, from where his journey back to the surface began. For his family – who had already been informed of his almost-certain death – the cook’s survival was a true miracle.

Okene suggested in an Associated Press interview that his survival was down to divine intervention. “When I was under the water,” he explained, “I told God: ‘If you rescue me, I will never go back to the sea again, never.’”

The survivor has since reneged on his promise, however. In a series of photos posted to his Facebook page Okene is seen getting reacquainted with the depths of the ocean – in a new career as a professional diver.