Six people are still missing, including British tech billionaire Mike Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter and Morgan Stanley International’s chairman, Jonathan Bloomer, after the luxury sail yacht they were holidaying on, the Bayesian, sank off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday morning.
The 56-metre Bayesian, a luxurious sail yacht owned by Mike Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, is believed to have been struck by a waterspout, a rare type of tornado that forms over water, at around 5am on Monday 19th August.
At the time that the storm hit, the vessel was anchored off the coast of the Sicilian town of Porticello, found around 20km east of the regional capital of Palermo. In comments to local press teams, a fisherman from the town said that the tornado lasted for around “10 minutes with strong winds and rain”.
“We saw a flare 500 meters from the dock,” he told the media. “We went to see what had happened. We only saw the floating debris of the boat. We immediately called the Coast Guard. The sea was terrible. The wind very strong… The vessel was hit head-on. I thought I would find someone in the sea. but nothing. The boat had disappeared from the radar.”
The captain of another yacht moored nearby has shared a similar story.
“We were also awakened by the storm,” Karsten Borner told a reporter for The Guardian. “The first thing I did was to start the engines of my sailboat to give more stability to the vessel. I don’t know if the Bayesian did the same. It seems like they were also suddenly caught by the storm. After securing our boat, we immediately approached the Bayesian, but it had already sunk. I have never seen a vessel of this size go down so quickly. Within a few minutes, there was nothing left. Then we saw the raft with the 15 passengers. It was a tragedy.”
22 people onboard
It has been widely reported that there were 22 people onboard -12 passengers and 10 crew – when the yacht sank. 15 were rescued from a life raft in the aftermath by the yacht captained by Borner, including nine of the crew members, a one-year-old baby and her parents.
According to press reports, the body of the yacht’s chef was retrieved from the water in the hours after the disaster, but a further six people remain missing.
Among those still unaccounted for are: Mike Lynch, the UK tech billionaire behind software company Autonomy; his 18-year-old daughter Hannah Lynch; the chairman of Morgan Stanley International, Jonathan Bloomer; his wife, Judy Bloomer; and Chris Morvillo, a US lawyer for Clifford Chance who represented Lynch during the US trial pertaining to his sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $11bn (€9.9bn). Lynch had been accused of fraud on multiple accounts, but was acquitted in June. The sixth missing person is yet to be identified.
Difficult search
Divers were brought in to search for those still missing as the weather cleared on Monday.
According to local media reports, the “practically intact” vessel is understood to be resting on the seafloor, 48 metres down. A combination of the depth, tight onboard spaces and diving time constraints is hampering search efforts.
“They [the divers] can stay underwater for a maximum of 12 minutes, two of which are needed to go up and down,” an emergency responder told Italian daily newspaper Giornale di Sicilia, as reported by Sky News, “so the real time to be able to carry out the search is 10 minutes per dive… The spaces inside the sailing ship are very small and if you encounter an obstacle, it is very complicated to move forward, just as it is very difficult to find alternative routes.”
As of 1.30pm local time, media teams on location were reporting that an operation was underway to make an opening in the yacht’s stern in a bid to establish better access to the interior of the vessel.
Odd coincidence
The sinking of the ship happened just two days after Stephen Chamberlain, Lynch’s co-defendant in a decade-long US trial linked to the sale of Autonomy, was hit by a car in Cambridgeshire in the UK. He was put on life support following the crash, but has since passed away.
Monaco Life is produced by real multi-media journalists writing original content. See more in our free newsletter, follow our Podcasts on Spotify, and check us out on Threads, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Tik Tok.
Photo via Perini Navi