The cold was a sustained physical challenge. He was in water that was cold enough to constitute a threat of hypothermia over the duration of his confinement. The platform he built from salvaged materials — the pieces of wall paneling — was an improvised solution to the problem of cold water contact: by getting his body partially out of the water, he reduced the rate of heat loss and extended the time before his core temperature dropped to dangerous levels.
The hunger and thirst were, by his account, severe. He had the cola and, possibly, the sardines from his salvage forays into the flooded cabin. Beyond these, he had no food or fresh water. Seawater that got into his mouth — whether from submersion during his trips through the flooded spaces or from splashing — hurt his tongue and throat, as he described. Seawater is not merely non-hydrating; the salt content increases dehydration when consumed.
The prayer was continuous. Okene is a Christian, and his faith was the psychological framework through which he organized his experience in the air pocket. He has described praying “about a hundred times,” recalling Bible verses he had read before sleeping, and making a direct bargain with God: if he was rescued, he would never return to the sea.
The specific form of his prayer — the direct address to God, the petition for rescue, the conditional promise — is consistent with the kind of intense personal supplication that extreme situations often produce in people whose relationship with faith is ordinarily more passive or habitual. Whether the prayer “worked” in any causal sense is not a question this article can address. What it did, functionally, was provide a structure for time when time had otherwise lost its structure, and a focus for consciousness when consciousness had nothing external to fix on. In that sense, whatever its theological status, it served a psychological function.