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Italian prosecutors are investigating how the superyacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily in a matter of minutes, leaving one crew member dead and six passengers, including UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, missing and presumed trapped inside.
“Everything happened extremely fast,” Vincenzo Zagarola, a coastguard official, told the Financial Times, as Italian divers continued their attempts to enter the wreck on the seabed on Wednesday.
He also said the wind that hit the British-registered yacht reached 60 knots (more than 110km/h), which is characterised as a Force 11 or a “violent storm” on the Beaufort scale.
The speed of the sinking of the 540-tonne yacht remains the biggest mystery about the accident, given that it would normally take much longer for such a large, modern vessel to founder even if it was laid flat on its side by the wind or completely overturned.
So rapid was the sinking that the crew did not appear to have time to send a Mayday distress signal. The first sign of the emergency was the firing of a red flare from the life raft that was seen by the coastguard and a skipper of a boat anchored nearby, who rescued the 15 survivors.
By the time the coastguard reached the location of the flare, the yacht had completely sunk.
Charlotte Golunski, a partner at Invoke Capital, founded by Lynch, described to medical staff how she remembered being asleep in her cabin and suddenly waking up in the water with her small daughter Sophia, according to Domenico Cipolla, director of the emergency unit at Palermo’s Di Cristina paediatric hospital.
When the 36-year-old mother lost grip of her toddler’s hand for two or three minutes, she said it was like “looking death in the eye”, according to Cipolla. Golunski went on to say how it all happened in one or two minutes.
The family were discharged from hospital and together with the other survivors are now receiving counselling at the Domina Zagarella hotel in Santa Flavia.
Fabio Genco, head of Palermo Emergency Medical Services told the FT:
“The little girl’s dad and other people said that some objects dropped on their heads during the sinking of the boat. The dad said that everything lasted three to five minutes. Survivors talked about being in the dark in the middle of the sea.”
Zagarola said there was no evidence from divers’ inspections on the seabed that the yacht’s 72-metre mast was broken or that the hull had any breaches. The British-flagged vessel is tilted on to its starboard side about 50 metres below the surface.
In the nearby town of Termini Imerese the public prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into the accident, in collaboration with the coastguard of Porticello, “to establish the exact dynamic of the shipwreck”, the coastguard has announced.
Zagarola told the FT the coastguard was still treating its operation as “a search for missing people, not bodies”, although there is scant hope of anyone surviving if they were trapped inside the boat.
Divers, assisted by an underwater drone, have managed to gain access to part of the sunken vessel but have not yet been able to search all the cabins or find any bodies.
Search operations for the six missing people also continued at Porto Bagnera, the picturesque fishing harbour of Porticello, near where the luxury yacht sank in the early hours of Monday, just 400 metres off the shore.
Perini Navi, the Viareggio-based shipyard that built Bayesian in 2008, was absorbed in 2022 by the listed Italian Sea Group, which declined a request for comment when contacted by the FT.
Additional reporting by Victor Mallet in London
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