By Giselda Vagnoni
PALERMO, Sicily (Reuters) -Divers scoured the wreck of a luxury yacht off Sicily’s coast on Tuesday to find six missing people, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter, following an intense storm that sank the vessel on Monday.
The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-metre-long (184-ft) superyacht, was carrying 22 people and anchored off the port of Porticello when it was hit by the fierce, pre-dawn storm.
Witnesses said the boat disappeared beneath the waves in a matter of minutes, baffling naval experts who said a boat as large as the Bayesian would have been designed to stay afloat for many hours despite taking on water.
Fifteen people escaped before it capsized and the body of one person who died was swiftly recovered. That left six passengers unaccounted for – Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah; Judy and Jonathan Bloomer, a non-executive chair of Morgan Stanley International; and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife, Neda Morvillo.
However, there was little chance of finding more survivors, rescuers said. “The fear is that the bodies got trapped inside the vessel,” said Salvatore Cocina, head of civil protection in Sicily.
The boat was lying at a depth of 49 metres (160 feet), giving divers only 8-10 minutes at the wreck site before they had to resurface. Entering the boat was also proving difficult, said the fire brigade, which is leading the search operation.
“Inside the sailing ship the spaces are very confined, and if you hit an obstacle it is very complicated to move forward, just as it is very difficult to find alternative routes,” said fire spokesman Luca Cari.
One official, who declined to be named, said the divers had opened one access point, but this did not mean they could easily reach all parts of the submerged vessel.
Fire department diver Marco Tilotta told reporters the boat appeared to be intact and was lying on its right side. Divers had not ascertained whether the 72-metre-long mast had snapped somewhere along its length during the tempest.
Karsten Borner, the skipper of a boat that had been moored alongside the Bayesian, said the yacht flipped on its side soon after the storm hit and sank within two minutes, giving those below deck little time to get to safety.
LYNCH TRIAL
Lynch, 59, is one of the UK’s best-known tech entrepreneurs. He built the country’s largest software firm, Autonomy, and was referred to as Britain’s Bill Gates.
He sold the firm to HP for $11 billion in 2011, after which the deal spectacularly unravelled with the U.S. tech giant accusing him of fraud, resulting in a lengthy trial. Lynch was eventually acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June.
Morvillo represented Lynch in the case, while Bloomer had appeared as a character witness on his behalf.
In an extraordinary coincidence, Stephen Chamberlain, Mike Lynch’s co-defendant in the trial, died following a road accident in Britain over the weekend, his lawyer said on Monday.
The Bayesian was owned by Lynch’s wife, who survived the disaster, and other guests on the yacht included Lynch’s colleagues. The only body so far retrieved was that of the onboard chef Ricardo Thomas, an Antiguan citizen.
The British government’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch said it sent four of its inspectors to Sicily to conduct a “preliminary assessment.”
‘DIDN’T SEE IT COMING’
One expert at the scene of the disaster who declined to be named said an early focus of the official investigation would be whether the yacht’s crew had closed access hatches into the vessel before the storm struck.
Investigators would look at whether appropriate measures had been taken, given the forecasts for bad weather overnight.
Borner, whose yacht was moored near the Bayesian, said that although there had been warnings of possible thunderstorms, there had been no indication they would be particularly violent.
“Thunderstorms can turn out good or bad and this one was a real violent squall … very violent, very intense, a lot of water, and I think a turning system like a tornado,” he told Reuters.
There was concern over how such a yacht was lost so quickly. One superyacht expert in Britain said the volume of water needed to sink the Bayesian was gigantic, with compartments in the ship designed to safeguard against such a catastrophe.
“I don’t think the industry has ever faced anything like this. It’s a horror story,” he said, declining to be named.
Storms and heavy rains have ravaged Italy in recent days, after weeks of scorching heat warmed the sea temperature to record highs, raising the risk of extreme weather conditions, experts said.
“The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), which is almost 3 degrees more than normal,” said meteorologist Luca Mercalli.
“We can’t say that this is all due to global warming but we can say that it has an amplifying effect,” he told Reuters.
(Writing by Crispian Balmer; Reporting by Alvise Armellini, Giulia Segreti, Gavin Jones, William Schomberg, Catarina Demony, Sam Tobin and Josephine Mason; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Sharon Singleton)
