Questions abound about what caused the superyacht to sink so quickly when a nearby sailboat was largely spared.
Divers searching the wreck of a superyacht that sank off Sicily have found the bodies of five passengers and are searching for one more as questions intensify about why the vessel sank so quickly when a nearby sailboat remained largely unscathed.
Rescue crews unloaded three body bags from rescue vessels that pulled into port at Porticello on Wednesday.
Salvatore Cocina, head of the Sicily civil protection agency, said two other bodies had also been found in the wreckage.
The bodies of British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were among those found inside one of the vessel’s cabins between two mattresses, The Telegraph reported.
The Bayesian, a 56-metre (184-foot) British-flagged yacht, went down in a storm early on Monday as it was moored about a kilometre (a half-mile) offshore. Civil protection officials said they believed the ship was struck by a tornado over the water, known as a waterspout, and sank quickly.
Fifteen people escaped in a lifeboat and were rescued by a nearby sailboat. One body was recovered on Monday – that of the yacht’s Antigua-born chef, Recaldo Thomas.
Lynch, 59, was one of the United Kingdom’s best-known tech entrepreneurs and had invited friends to join him on the yacht to celebrate his recent acquittal in a fraud trial in the United States.
Besides Lynch and his daughter, the other people unaccounted for after the disaster were Judy and Jonathan Bloomer, a non-executive chair of Morgan Stanley International; and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife, Neda Morvillo.
The yacht remains lying sideways on the seabed a, 50 metres (164 feet) underwater – a depth that required special precautions that complicated the recovery work. Divers are only able to stay in the vessel for 8-10 minutes before having to resurface.
Investigators from the Termini Imerese Public Prosecutor’s Office were acquiring evidence for their criminal investigation, which they opened immediately after the tragedy, even though no formal suspects have been publicly identified.
Questions abound about what caused the superyacht, which was built in 2008 by Italian shipyard Perini Navi, to sink so quickly, when the nearby Sir Robert Baden Powell sailboat was largely spared and managed to rescue the 15 survivors.
Experts want to know about the position of the keel, which on a large sailboat such as the Bayesian might have been retractable, to allow it to enter shallower ports, or if a freak waterspout struck the vessel and simply pushed it onto its side.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty as to whether it had a lifting keel and whether it might have been up,” said Jean-Baptiste Souppez, a fellow of the Royal Institute of Naval Architects and the editor of the Journal of Sailing Technology.
“But if it had, then that would reduce the amount of stability that the vessel had, and therefore made it easier for it to roll over on its side,” he said in an interview.
Yachts such as the Bayesian are also required to have watertight, sub-compartments that are specifically designed to prevent a rapid, catastrophic sinking even when some parts fill with water.
“So for the vessel to sink, especially this fast, you are really looking at taking water on board very quickly, but also in a number of locations along the length of the vessel, which again indicates that it might have been rolled over on its side,” Souppez said.
