PORTICELLO, ITALY - Searches resumed for a third day Wednesday on the wreck of a luxury yacht that sank off Sicily, with hope fading that the six missing passengers would be found alive. The search operation, which involves specialist divers aided by an underwater drone, continued until late on Tuesday and resumed at first light on Wednesday morning, firefighters said.
The 56-metre (185 feet) British-flagged “Bayesian” was anchored some 700 metres from Porticello with 10 crew and 12 passengers on board when it was struck by a waterspout -- akin to a mini-tornado -- before dawn on Monday. One body was found in the hours after the sinking, believed to be the yacht’s chef, named in several media outlets as Canadian-Antiguan Recaldo Thomas. Fifteen people were rescued. But UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his teenage daughter Hannah, his lawyer Christopher Morvillo and his wife Neda, and Jonathan Bloomer, the chair of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Judy remain missing.
AFP reporters saw a steady stream of boats on Wednesday morning going in and out of the harbour of Porticello, east of Palermo, ferrying divers to and from the search site. Firefighters said on Tuesday evening that divers had entered the inside of the wreck, but that it was a “long and complex” operation. The yacht is largely intact, resting on the seabed some 50 metres down. Despite eyewitness testimonies that the 75-metre mast had snapped, reports on Wednesday suggested that it too, survived the incident.
A coastguard official, Captain Vincenzo Zagarola, had told Italian radio on Tuesday morning that it was “difficult to imagine” that the search would end well. But experts noted that superyachts such as the “Bayesian” were designed with watertight subdivisions. “There are records of survivors found in such air pockets,” noted Dr. Jean-Baptiste Souppez, a UK engineering expert and fellow of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, in a commentary provided by the Science Media Centre. He noted the case of Nigerian sailor Harrison Okene, who was rescued in 2013 after spending nearly three days trapped in an air pocket after his ship capsized in rough seas off the Nigerian coast. But he added: “Whether air pockets formed on the Bayesian is simply impossible to predict.” The passengers were guests of Lynch -- an entrepreneur sometimes referred to as Britain’s Bill Gates -- to celebrate his acquittal in a massive US fraud case.
The 59-year-old was acquitted on all charges in a San Francisco court in June after he was accused of an $11 billion fraud linked to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard. Among the survivors was Charlotte Golunski, board director of a company founded by Lynch, who has described how she briefly lost hold of her one-year-old daughter before grabbing her again. Both were plucked to safety. Fabio Genco, a member of the Palermo Emergency Medical Services who was among the team that treated the child, described the “apocalyptic” situation he found on arriving at the scene.
“The word that the mother and all the injured kept repeating was ‘darkness’, the darkness that they experienced during the shipwreck,” he told the BBC’s Newsnight programme. “They spoke of about five minutes, maybe from three to five minutes, from the moment the boat was lifted, raised by the waves of the sea, until it sank.” He said the survivors rescued had been in shock: “There were truly apocalyptic scenes where everyone was searching and hoping to find the people who at that moment, were not present or just missing.” All the survivors treated in hospital have been discharged, he confirmed.
The speed with which the yacht sank, and the fact that other boats around it were unaffected, was extraordinary.
Some key questions remain, including whether the keel, which provides a counterbalance to the towering mast, was down when the storm hit.
Matthew Schanck, from the Maritime Search and Rescue Council, told AFP what happened was a “pretty unprecedented”, describing it as a “black swan event” -- something that was unlikely, but had a big impact.
The yacht was hit by a waterspout, which UK meteorologist Peter Inness described as a “narrow column of rotating air below a thunderstorm that occurs over water”.
Like tornadoes, they suck up air in a rotating motion. Many are fairly inconsequential, but some can pack winds of more than 100 kilometres (62 miles) per hour, said Inness.
Jean-Marie Dumon, a former naval officer now with the GICAN, the French maritime industry association, added that conditions with winds of 100kph or more can “create completely anarchic sea conditions which can cause capsizing”.