Fresh searches in Sicily yacht sinking with Morgan Stanley boss among 6 missing

PORTICELLO, Italy: Specialist divers on Tuesday (Aug 20) launched a fresh search for six people, including UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch and the chairman of Morgan Stanley International,missing since their yacht capsized off the Italian island of Sicily.
The 56-metre British-flagged sailing yacht “Bayesian” was anchored some 700 metres from the port with 10 crew and 12 passengers on board when it was struck by a waterspout, a sort of mini tornado, before dawn on Monday.
Fifteen people aboard, including a mother and her one-year-old baby, were plucked to safety but the body of one man, reported to be the yacht’s chef, was found a few hours later.
On Tuesday, divers searching for the six people still missing strapped on oxygen bottles and began their descent in choppy seas to the wreck, some 50 metres below the surface.
Because of the depth, each dive is restricted to 12 minutes, including two minutes for descending and ascending, according to Luca Cari, spokesman for the fire service.
The passengers were guests of Lynch – a celebrated technology entrepreneur and investor sometimes referred to as the UK’s answer to Bill Gates – celebrating his recent acquittal in a massive US fraud case.
Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares was among 15 people rescued, but the businessman and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were missing, according to Salvo Cocina, head of the Civil Protection Agency in Sicily.
The chair of Morgan Stanley International, Jonathan Bloomer, who testified for Lynch in the US case, was also missing alongside his wife, Judy, the UK insurer Hiscox said on Tuesday.
Bloomer is also the chair of Hiscox, which issued a statement saying it was “deeply shocked and saddened” by the incident.
Christopher Morvillo of law firm Clifford Chance, who represented Lynch, was also on the boat along with his wife, media reports said.
Lynch, 59, was acquitted on all charges in a San Francisco court in early June after he was accused of a US$11 billion fraud linked to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
Divers trained to work in tight spaces were flown in from Rome and Sardinia late on Monday, but the search was made difficult by the fact the yacht remains largely intact.
Marco Tilotta, from the Palermo fire service divers’ unit, said some of the divers had worked on the wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which sank off Tuscany in 2012, killing 32 people.
Tilotta told AFP that search efforts were concentrated on getting inside the sleeping and living areas of the yacht, which was lying on its side in one piece.
A search of the bridge earlier on Tuesday turned up nothing.
“The spaces inside the boat are very tight and if you encounter an obstacle it is very complicated to move forward, just as it is very difficult to find alternative routes,” said Cari, from the fire service.
The luxury vessel was moored off Porticello, east of Palermo, when violent winds and rains suddenly swept up the coast.
“It was terrible. The boat was hit by really strong wind and shortly after it went down,” survivor Charlotte Golunski told ANSA news agency.
Golunski, board director at Luminance, a company founded by Lynch, lost hold of her one-year-old daughter in the waves “for two seconds”, before managing to grab her “while the sea raged”.
“Lots of people were screaming” in the dark, said Golunski, who managed to get on a life raft.
The Bayesian was built by the Italian shipbuilding firm Perini Navi in 2008, boasting a 75-metre mast, the tallest aluminium sailing mast in the world, according to the Charter World website.
A photograph posted on social media Monday by the Baia Santa Nicolicchia bar in Porticello showed the yacht lit up, its towering mast shining in the darkness, just a few hours before the storm hit.
A waterspout is a column that descends from a cloud to form a rotating mixture of wind and water over a body of water, often during severe thunderstorms.
It may have been strengthened by unusually warm waters in the Mediterranean, experts said.
The yacht, which had been used by Lynch and his wealthy guests to celebrate a court victory, disappeared into the sea within minutes of being hit by the tornado-like storm.
“A waterspout is a narrow column of rotating air below a thunderstorm that occurs over water” and is “part of the same weather ‘family’ as tornadoes”, said Peter Inness, a meteorologist at the University of Reading in Britain, in comments released by the UK’s Science Media Centre.
Like tornadoes, they suck up air in a rotating motion, usually causing less damage than tornadoes over land, however.
“Changes in wind direction with height are also needed to set up the rotation of air within the waterspout,” said Inness.
While many waterspouts are “fairly inconsequential”, lasting just a few seconds, some can pack winds of more than 100kmh, he added.
“Winds of this strength coinciding with the location of a boat are capable of causing damage or capsize, especially because the wind direction varies very rapidly,” Inness said.
Karsten 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 battle to keep his vessel steady.
Borner saw the Bayesian’s mast “bend and then snap”, according to Italy’s Corriere della Sera daily.
Italian authorities have opened a probe into the incident, while the UK’s marine accident investigation branch is sending four inspectors to Palermo.
The boat is reported to be owned by Lynch’s family and is named after the Bayesian statistical theory, which assesses the probability of something happening.