11/18/2025
It sounds like a scene from a survival film, but it happened in real life. Three men from Nigeria clung to the rudder of a giant oil tanker for 11 days, traveling more than 2,700 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.
With nothing but a narrow metal ledge above the waterline, they endured freezing nights, crashing waves, and hours of darkness that seemed endless. Every inch of their world shifted beneath them — the metal vibrating with the ship’s engines, the ocean roaring just below their feet, and wind slicing across their skin.
They had almost no food. No safety. No shelter. Just the hope that somehow, somewhere, land would appear.
When the tanker finally reached Las Palmas in Spain’s Canary Islands, coast guards spotted something no one expected: three exhausted but living men curled above the rudder. Thin, dehydrated, shaking — alive. The rescuers called their survival “extraordinary,” for good reason. Eleven days in that position defies logic, strength, and human limits.
Desperation for a better life can push people farther than any storm.
