He decided to face the fear directly.
## The Return to the Sea
In 2015, approximately two years after the rescue, Harrison Okene enrolled in commercial diving training. He became a certified IMCA Class 2 Commercial Air Diver — the International Marine Contractors Association certification that qualifies a diver for offshore commercial work including the installation, construction, and repair of subsea infrastructure for the oil and gas industry.
The career he chose to pursue after training is a direct continuation of the offshore oil sector he had worked in as a cook, but from a different position in the operational hierarchy and from a completely different physical relationship to the water. As a cook, he was on the surface — on a vessel, above the water, in the part of the offshore industry that supports the subsea work from above. As a certified commercial diver, he goes below.
The diver who had found him at the bottom of the Jascon-4 was reported to have presented him with his diploma when he completed his certification. This detail, if accurate, represents one of the more precisely ironic elegances in the aftermath of the rescue: the man who found Okene alive in the dark, who was the first to understand that something extraordinary had happened, handed him the credential that allowed him to return to that world professionally. The finder and the found, on opposite sides of the same ceremony.
Why did he become a diver rather than simply returning to the sea in some other capacity? His explanation, given in various forms across multiple interviews, consistently returns to the theme of confronting rather than avoiding fear. He has said that his goal was to become a rescue diver — someone who could be to others what van Heerden’s team had been to him. The specific professional aspiration to help people in the kind of underwater emergency he had survived is a direct and logical extension of the experience, in the same way that people who receive emergency medical care sometimes go into medicine, or people who survive house fires sometimes become firefighters.