INSANE survival stories | Part 1

when i was in college i went on a cruise from florida down to the bahamas and then back about halfway to the bahamas we hit some bad weather the boat was rocking pretty aggressively to the point where we weren't allowed to go onto the upper decks of the ship chairs and tables were shifting around the crew and the staff were unconcerned this is something they've been through they sail this route regularly they know the ship is equipped to handle pretty rough weather but as a passenger it was really terrifying to just suddenly realize that despite the the safety the perceived safety of this huge multi-hundred million dollar ship the reality is is when you're out in the ocean mother nature's gonna do whatever it's gonna do now fortunately the the weather did subside and sure enough the ship was fine and we sailed through it but it always stuck with me that if you're out in the middle of the ocean and something goes bad it goes really bad the two stories i'm going to share are about groups of people that were out on the open ocean and something went bad very very bad before we get going on today's stories if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format then you have come to the right channel because that's all i do and i upload three to four sometimes even five times every week and if that's of interest to you i would encourage you to gently armbar the like button and then subscribe to my channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of those weekly uploads alright let's get into the stories in the very early hours of may 26 2013 three tugboats were towing this massive chevron oil tanker in the gulf of guinea they were about 32 kilometers off the coast of nigeria two of the tugboats were pressed up against the sides of this huge tanker to provide stability as it gets towed the third tugboat which was called the jazz cone 4 sat way out in front had the main tow line strapped to the front of the tanker and was doing all of the actual towing on board that lead tugboat the jaskin 4 were 12 crew members who had all been hired by a company called west african ventures it was a nigerian-based company they owned the ship and they had contracted them to come out and be a part of this towing operation one of the crew members was a man named harrison o'keen he was from nigeria and he was the ship's cook at around 4 45 that morning harrison was in his quarters he had been sleeping but he had woken up because the ship was swaying pretty dramatically it was very rough seas but he like the rest of the crew were accustomed to rough choppy water so he gets up he unlocks his bedroom door and he goes out into the hall when he looks down the hall he sees that all of the other doors are shut and locked the crew of the jazz cone 4 had a policy that whenever they slept or were in their rooms they would shut and lock the doors because piracy is a really big threat after harrison looked down the hall at all of these locked doors he started making his way down the hall in the other direction towards the bathroom he kind of stumbled down the hall as the ship rocked from the very rough seas he gets to the bathroom and shuts the door at 4 50 in the morning we know this because at 4 50 in the morning a rogue wave hit the side of jackson 4 and almost completely flipped it upside down snapped the tow line the ship is completely on its side and it's sinking very fast he tried to push open the metal bathroom door but already a surge of water is coming down the hall and pressing him into the bathroom pushes against that surge of water and gets the door open and now he's standing on the ceiling of the hallway that he was just in a moment ago because the boat is now completely inverted and he's looking down the hall three of the crew members have managed to come out of their locked rooms and in a panic are trying to make their way up to the exit he sees them as another surge of water blasts in through one of the windows and literally sweeps them away and he knows they're dead the power cuts out right as another surge of water is coming down the hall to him he turns his body in this rush of sea water this freezing sea water comes pouring down the hall and it takes harrison and throws him down this little hallway and slams him into yet another bathroom it was actually an officer's bathroom it was connected to an officer's room and so now he's inside of this other bathroom and he's kind of like clamoring naturally instinctively to go up to try to get to air because that's what anyone would do if you're underwater in a panic and as he's swimming up he couldn't believe it when he gets to air his head clears the surface in the bathroom and he's in an air pocket but it's pitch black all the power is out the ship is rapidly sinking the water is freezing harrison has only got his boxer shorts on he doesn't have a light source he doesn't have food he doesn't have water and he has this couple cubic feet of air that any moment he's waiting for it to collapse he knows these are his final moments and he remembers a prayer that his wife had texted him before he started this particular job and he started reciting the prayer in his head as he waited to die the ship slams into the ocean floor but the air pocket doesn't collapse so harrison is in this tiny little air pocket 30 meters below the ocean's surface at this point even though harrison has no idea how he just survived the shipwreck he now has to deal with the fact that he's eventually going to run out of air he'll die of dehydration he'll die of exposure he's in freezing water up to his neck and most terrifyingly sharks and other animals are going to start converging on the ship to look for food and he is in a bathroom that although there's the air pocket the door is open into the main hall and his entire body is inside of this bathroom meaning if a shark were in the hallway swimming down the inside of this hall and it made it to the bathroom he's completely exposed with no way to shut the door it was wedged open so his lower half is completely exposed to whatever wildlife is inside of the ship so he literally is just waiting to die he just doesn't know how he's going to die after sitting there for quite a while he started to feel very cold and he knew that if he didn't find a way to get his body a little bit higher into the air pocket basically get his upper body out of the water that he was certainly going to die soon just from hypothermia even though he knew he was doomed his will to live was just it was bubbling through he did not want to die yet and as he's sitting there thinking how is he going to get himself up into this air pocket because he had nothing he could step on or kind of stand on he realized that right next to him there was the officer's room this was the officer's bathroom and the door was open he could if you wanted to he could dive down and swim through the door and go into the officer's bedroom and look for supplies and in his mind he thought he could probably pull off some of the paneling because it's going to be pitch black in there if you just swim straight to the far side of the room he could get to some of the fake wood paneling or whatever it was and he could yank it down and as he's building up his courage to dive into pitch black water he starts hearing this horrible sound of large sea creatures smashing into the boat they were basically looking for entrance points into the boat and then they would come into the boat sharks and he could hear them bumping up against the insides of the ship and all he's thinking is i'm completely exposed i'm doomed i gotta go i gotta go in there i gotta at least make an attempt to save myself and so listening to sharks and other animals searching for things to eat he takes a deep breath and in total darkness he dives down and swims into the officer's bedroom and as he's swimming because he's just going straight across to the far wall to start yanking off that paneling he's bumping into things that he believes our bodies he doesn't know but he thinks they are he gets to the far wall and he yanks off a piece of paneling he swims back one successful trip he goes back down and he makes a number of trips until he's able to fashion that little raft he had in mind like a little step stool that pushed him up into the air pocket to where half of his upper body was now out of the freezing water also while he was in the officer's room even though it was pitch black he was kind of like feeling around for things and he wound up finding a bottle of soda and a flashlight so he turns on his flashlight he drinks a soda and he just takes a breath even though he's still in the same terrible situation he's thankful for that little victory about 24 hours would go by where he has this light on and he's nursing the soda he knows he's either going to die from sharks hypothermia dehydration something's going to kill him but part of him is thinking maybe if a dive team is able to locate the ship they're going to come down to retrieve bodies and maybe they'll find me maybe i can hold out that long and so as he's as he's thinking about this he's getting a little flicker of hope two horrible things happen his light goes out flashlight doesn't work at the same time that he describes hearing the large sea creatures make their way into the officer's room right next to him so i want you to think about this you're at the bottom of the ocean you're in a ship that has sunk you're in a little air pocket you really don't have any supplies to last longer than a few days it's total darkness you had your flashlight it's gone out it's totally dark a shark that has been eating your friends or more than one shark is now literally feet away from you and you can hear it eating the bodies that apparently are in there you are exposed to them because there's an entrance to that room and there's an entrance to the hall the fear must have been indescribable for the next 36 hours harrison sat there listening to a shark slam into the wall but never attack him he heard sharks in the main section of the ship bumping around waiting at any moment that if the ship were to just tilt a little bit his air pocket's going to collapse it's unfathomable how terrible those 36 hours must have been at the 60 hour mark he hears what sounds like something metal banging on the outside of the ship he notices through the through the hallway because he has a bit of a vantage point through the water down the hall in front of him he sees a flicker of light and there's no light down here so it really stood out without even thinking about it he takes a deep breath and swims right into the hallway the one place he had not been since he had gone into the bathroom because there are sharks and he starts swimming farther and farther and farther away from his air pocket and he's running out of air he can't find the light he doesn't even know if he saw a light he thinks he might be hallucinating and he's realizing i'm almost out of air you know he's looking around and he decides i gotta go back to my air pocket and he turns around he's trying to swim back he's looking for his bathroom he's swimming as fast as he can he's about to run out of air and he makes it to his air pocket and his head goes up and he takes a big breath and he's not sure if he really actually saw the light or not and he's thinking that was it i thought i was going to be rescued but i was just imagining it and then a miracle it was a diver and the diver had come back the diver was part of a crew that had been sent down to recover bodies no one lives for three days underwater so the diver comes down his way and harrison knew that he was going to scare the daylights out of this diver and so he gently touched him on the back and the diver reacts really violently because he's expecting it to be an animal of some kind and harrison reaches out and just grabs the diver's hand and squeezes it gently and shows him his hand and the diver's got a big light on his head pokes his head up into this air pocket you see this man that for the past 36 hours has been in total darkness with absolutely no way out he was done for and the look on harrison's face is just it's priceless they fitted harrison with a dive mask and they brought him up he did not immediately go to the surface because he had been at depth for so long he had to go through something called decompression if he had just breathed air at normal pressure he would have died so they put him in a decompression chamber for 60 hours before actually bringing him to the surface and so ultimately harrison was okay but the trauma of this experience was so extreme that to this day harrison's wife says that basically every night he wakes up thinking he's on a sinking ship in october of 1982 debra kylie and her four friends were hired by a billionaire to take his brand new luxury 18-meter yacht called the trashman from maine all the way down to florida a pretty significant journey along the east coast of the united states debra and her friends were very experienced sailors they had done trips like this before driving these luxury yachts around this was just going to be a great trip the weather was beautiful the forecast looked perfect and they were off two days into their journey when they were off the coast of north carolina a freak storm came out of nowhere and all of a sudden their ship is in this massive massive storm and despite their best efforts to keep water from coming in eventually the ship begins to sink and so as the ship is clearly sinking the crew has to abandon it and they jump into the violently surging sea and they climb aboard this little tiny life raft with no food no water no life-saving equipment and meg who was one of her friends one of debra's friends had cut open her leg really badly when the ship was initially sinking something had fell and cut her leg so she's bleeding into the water as they clamored into this dinghy deborah remembers something nudging one of her legs and looking out and not just seeing one or two sharks but she describes seeing hundreds of sharks 18 foot long tiger sharks who will eat almost anything including people had detected meg's bleeding leg when she was holding on to the dinghy before she climbed in they had all swarmed the area and they start feeling bumps underneath their raft as the tiger sharks are swimming up and ramming into them the storm ultimately passed and daylight broke and they're out in this dinghy they don't know what to do they're surrounded by all these sharks that are literally swimming around them they have no resources they have nothing they have no way to save themselves meg was becoming very sick from the wound in her leg and everyone knew that probably they were going to die out here so desperately thirsty were some of the crew members that they began leaning over and drinking seawater until they would vomit it was around this time when they were drinking seawater on the third day that some of the hallucinations began they all would would see ships in the distance and they would hear things that weren't really there they were losing it and it was also around this time that john one of the crew members said that he saw land and he leapt out of the boat they screamed for him to come back but he lost his mind and they said he only made it about a few meters away from the boat before they hear him start screaming and the sharks swarm him and pull him under the water deborah would say that when this happened they heard the scream and they all ducked down inside of the boat didn't say a word didn't even react to it they knew what was happening and they knew it was going to happen to them they were all going to die out here shortly after john had jumped in the water and been eaten by sharks mark stands up and says that he needs to get something at the store he was clearly hallucinating the other three they tell him you're hallucinating get back here sit back down he wasn't having it and he stepped off the boat immediately just like john the sharks swarm him except they pull him underneath their life raft in fact deborah would say that the violence of the sharks attacking him caused their dinghy to spin and much like when jon had been attacked they all just laid there in silence because they knew that they were all doomed by the fourth day everybody was on a steady decline they didn't have any water any food meg especially was outright dying i mean she had this horrible wound that had gone untreated and at some point debra and the other crew member who was not hurt his name was brad they fell asleep and when they woke up meg had passed away from her infection it took off her jewelry and any of her valuables they could give to her family and then they put her on the edge of the boat they said a couple words a little funeral for her and then they pushed her into the water and then they laid down inside of the raft as the sharks attacked at this point deborah and brad the last two they they are laying in this lifeboat fully exposed to the elements they have no way to save themselves and at some point they fell asleep and they probably thought they wouldn't wake up again but they woke up on the fifth day and brad looks out and thinks he sees a ship and so he looks down and looks back up to make sure he's not hallucinating and he still sees the ship he looks down again and looks back up and it's still a ship and it's coming it's coming closer to them and he tells deborah hey there's a ship i'm not imagining it there's a ship and she does the same thing she kind of looks looks away like is that really a ship and sure enough it was and they start waving and using all their energy to try to get this ship to see them and the ship has clearly seen them they're waving back that ship would end up coming over scooping up debra and brad getting them to a hospital and they would make full recoveries deborah would go on to be an incredible motivational speaker as you can imagine with an experience like that and she also wrote a book about her experience being lost at sea brad would actually continue to go back to sea he was an accomplished mariner he would end up becoming the captain of his own ship and he would regularly sail that route that they crashed on it's hard to imagine harrison deborah and brad going back to a normal life but ultimately they did you know they had this incredible experience i'm sure it was incredibly traumatic but i'm sure it gave them a new sense of purpose in the life that they were now being gifted because they really should not have been alive deborah would actually say in one of her keynotes that there's never a day you feel more thankful for life than the day you almost die if you enjoyed today's stories i would ask you to please kindly armbar the like button and then subscribe to my channel and turn on notifications so you don't miss any of my weekly three to four video uploads that sound an awful lot like what you just listened to if you want to get in touch with me you can message me on instagram my handle is john ballen416 i'm also very active on tiktok where my handle is mr ballen wherever i see you i'm just incredibly thankful for your support and until next time see ya

Channel: MrBallen

Views: 1,959,744

Rating: 4.9618793 out of 5

Keywords: shark, scary, story, scariest death, worst way to die, scariest way to die, ocean, deep sea, ship, shipwreck, nigeria, north carolina, tiger shark, scared, lost at sea, story time, scary story, survival, shark week

Id: qO6EAw8kVpA

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020