Divers were searching for six missing people, including British technology tycoon Mike Lynch, who were on board the British-flagged luxury yacht Bayesian, which sank off the coast of Sicily during a storm.
Specialist cave divers, in 12-minute underwater shifts, were searching for six missing passengers and crew members on Tuesday. The yacht Bayesian was carrying a crew of 10 people and 12 passengers when it suddenly sank near a Mediterranean island around 4 a.m. on Monday. One body was recovered and 15 people survived.
Fire and rescue officials said six people believed to have remained in the hull of the sailboat would be considered missing until they were found among the wreckage.
Italian civil defence officials believe a sudden and severe storm that hit the Sicilian coast in the early hours of Monday caused a water tornado at the very spot where the 56-metre (184-foot) British-flagged Bayesian vessel was moored. Karsten Borner, the captain of another yacht moored nearby, found a lifeboat with 15 people, some of whom were injured. They brought them aboard their yacht and alerted the coastguard.
Rescue services reported that the wreck rested at a depth of 50 metres (163 feet) about half a mile off the shore of Porticello fishing village.
Missings and survivors
In June, Lynch was acquitted of all charges in a US fraud trial related to the $11bn sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. However, Lynch still faces a potentially huge bill stemming from a civil case in London that HP largely won in 2022. The amount of damages in that case has yet to be determined, but HP is seeking $4 billion.
Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter Hannah was reportedly among those missing. His wife, Angela Bacares, and 14 others survived. One of Lynch’s US attorneys, Christopher Morvillo of Clifford Chance, and Morvillo’s wife, Neda, went missing on Tuesday, according to the civil protection agency.
Jonathan Bloomer, non-executive chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Judy are also missing. One body was recovered on Monday, identified as a flight cook.
Charlotte Golunski was among the survivors. She said she lost her one-year-old daughter Sofia in the water for a moment, but then managed to grab her and hold her above the waves until a lifeboat inflated. The father, identified by ANSA as James Emslie, also survived.
The Dutch Foreign Ministry stated that the Dutchman, whose identity was withheld for privacy reasons, also managed to survive.
More details
Sicily has been languishing in a heatwave this summer, and a panel of UN climate change experts says the Mediterranean Sea is particularly vulnerable to climate change, with the rate of warming about 20 per cent higher than the global average. Experts say it is extremely rare for a luxury sailing yacht of this size to capsize due to weather events.
Skip Novak, a lifelong sailor who has taken part in multiple round the world yacht races and written books about sailing, said:
“This just doesn’t happen. You know, boats sink because things like keels fall off, or they run aground and breach the hull … whereas just from a weather angle, a boat that big being pushed over on its side is absolutely extraordinary.”
When you’re at anchor, even if it’s blowing with a storm in the Mediterranean, you rarely shut the whole boat down because nobody expects something like this to happen. So if the boat wasn’t completely watertight at the deck, you’d have flooding going in. It would take a couple minutes and that would be it.
As the search for the missing continues, authorities have already begun trying to reconstruct an accurate picture of what happened. Prosecutors in the Sicilian town of Termini Imerese have launched an investigation, as is usual in such cases, even when no suspects have been identified.
The British Marine Accident Investigation Branch said four of its inspectors were on their way to Palermo.
