Okene’s description of the speed of the sinking is consistent across his various interviews: the vessel went down very fast. He was in the bathroom when it started. “The vessel just started going down,” he told explorersweb.com. The rapidity of the capsizing — the way the vessel flipped and flooded before most of the crew had any time to respond — is part of what made the survival rate so catastrophic.
The crew members who were in their locked cabins had, in effect, no viable escape route once the vessel inverted. The disorientation of a vessel that has flipped — in which the floor is now the ceiling and the orientation of every door and ladder and hatch has reversed — combined with the speed of flooding and the darkness of a 5 a.m. capsize would have made escape from a locked cabin extraordinarily difficult even for a crew member who was conscious, oriented, and uninjured.
Okene, who was in the bathroom rather than a locked cabin, was in a different situation.
## The Path Through the Dark
What happened in the immediate aftermath of the capsizing, from Okene’s account as reported across multiple interviews and as collected in various journalism about the event, is a story of movement through a transformed and terrifying space.
The vessel inverted. Okene was thrown around in the dark. He found his way through the disoriented interior by feel, by the sound of rushing water, and by the instinct to move away from the flooding rather than into it.