Divers spent a second day on Tuesday searching for six people believed to be trapped when a luxury yacht sank off the Italian island of Sicily, including a British tech tycoon, his colleagues and his teenage daughter.
The 56-metre sailing vessel ‘Bayesian’ was moored about 700 meters from the port with 10 crew and 12 passengers when it was hit by a wave of water, a type of mini-tornado, before dawn on Monday.
Fifteen people, including a mother and her one-year-old baby, were rescued, but the body of a man — reported to be the yacht’s chef — was recovered.
Among the six missing were British technology entrepreneur and investor Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, and Jonathan Bloomer, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Judy.
The passengers were guests of Lynch — sometimes referred to as the UK’s answer to Bill Gates — celebrating his recent acquittal in a massive US fraud case.
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Experts and the Italian coastguard described the superyacht’s rapid sinking as an “extraordinary” event.
The search was made difficult by the fact that the yacht remains largely intact, emergency services said.
The British-flagged vessel lies 50 meters below the surface, with specialist divers taking a minute to descend to the wreck and another minute to return.
They are limited to 12 minutes total each dive due to water pressure, according to Luca Cari, a fire department spokesman.
Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was among those rescued, according to Salvo Cocina, head of Sicily’s Civil Protection Agency.
In addition to Bloomer, who testified for Lynch in the US case, those missing include Lynch’s lawyer Christopher Morvillo and his wife, according to law firm Clifford Chance.
Lynch, 59, was acquitted of all charges in a San Francisco court in early June after being accused of an $11 billion fraud related to the sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
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It emerged on Tuesday that a co-defendant, former Autonomy executive Stephen Chamberlain, died after being hit by a car on Saturday in England.
“Tight Spaces”
Divers trained to work in confined spaces were flown in from Rome and Sardinia to take part in the Sicilian survey.
Marco Tilotta, from the Palermo fire service’s diving unit, said some of the team worked on the wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which sank off Tuscany in 2012, killing 32 people.
Tillota told AFP that search efforts were focused on getting inside the sleeping and living quarters of the yacht, which was on its side in one piece.
A search of the bridge earlier Tuesday turned up nothing.
“The spaces inside the boat are very tight and if you come across an obstacle it’s very complicated to move forward and it’s very difficult to find alternative routes,” said Cari, from the fire service.
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The luxury vessel was anchored off Porticello, east of Palermo, when violent winds and rains suddenly swept the coast.
“It was terrible. The boat was hit by a very strong wind and shortly afterwards it went down,” survivor Charlotte Golunski told the ANSA news agency.
Golunski, a board director at Luminance, a company founded by Lynch, lost her one-year-old daughter in the waves “for two seconds” before she managed to grab her “while the sea was raging”.
“A lot of people were screaming” in the dark, said Golunski, who managed to climb into a life raft.
The web “broke”
According to the Charter World website, “Bayesian” which is said to be owned by the Lynch family, was built by Italian shipbuilder Perini Navi in 2008, boasting a 75m mast, the tallest aluminum sailing mast in the world.
A photo posted on social media on Monday from the Baia Santa Nicolicchia bar in Porticello showed the yacht lit up, its towering mast glowing in the dark, just hours before the storm hit.
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A gutter is a column that descends from a cloud to form a swirling mixture of wind and water over a body of water, often during heavy storms.
“This is a large, luxury superyacht that foundered quite quickly in a touristic, well-known sailing area off Sicily. It’s quite unprecedented,” Matthew Shank, of the Maritime Search and Rescue Council, told AFP.
“This is an extraordinary event. It’s what I would call a black swan event,” he said.
Carsten Borner, the captain of another yacht anchored nearby at the time of the storm, said there was a “very strong hurricane gust” and he had to fight to keep his boat steady.
Borner saw the yacht’s mast “bend and then bang,” according to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Italian authorities have launched an investigation into the incident, while the UK’s Maritime Accident Investigation Branch has sent four inspectors to Palermo.
Source: AFP