They expected corpses. Every professional calculation pointed that way. Twelve men had been aboard the Jascon-4 when it capsized in the Atlantic Ocean off Nigeria’s coast in the early hours of May 26, 2013, and three days had passed without any signal from the wreck. The dive team from DCN Diving descended not to rescue but to recover. What one diver found instead — a living hand reaching out of the dark — would become one of the most documented and most studied survival stories in modern maritime history.
## What the Divers Found
The South African dive team reached the Jascon-4 on May 28, 2013, lowered into water approximately 30 meters deep — roughly 100 feet — off the coast of Nigeria’s Delta State. The tugboat lay on the seabed upside down, the way a capsized vessel settles when its crew decks are at the bottom and its hull faces upward like the back of a turtle. The conditions inside would have been the conditions of catastrophe: dark, cold, disorienting, the geometry of the interior reversed by the inversion.
Their job was to recover bodies. This was the expectation — shared by the dive team, by the vessel’s operators, by Chevron, which had contracted the Jascon-4 for towing operations — that shaped everything about how they entered the wreck. Recovery dives are different from rescue dives. The equipment is the same but the orientation is different. You are not looking for signs of life because signs of life are not expected.
Nico van Heerden, a 32-year-old South African diver, had spent approximately three hours forcing open a door inside the wreck before reaching the location where crew members would have been. He had already found two bodies. He was continuing the search when something tapped him on the back of the neck.