How Mike Lynch’s luxury yacht sank in minutes

It was 3am on Monday and Captain Karsten Börner and his crew were already awake, preparing for a storm approaching just off the Sicilian coast.

Behind their schooner was a luxury yacht carrying tech mogul Mike Lynch and a group of friends, family and advisers. Built to withstand hurricanes, Bayesian was 56 meters (184 feet) long and worth an estimated £30 million ($39 million), making her one of the world’s most capable sailing vessels. peak.

Sometime between 4am and 4:30am the weather hit. Börner and his crew worked hard just to keep their ship, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, upright. Despite being anchored, he had to run the engine at full power just to keep it steady. There was a violent gust of wind and heavy rain, which Börner suspected was a tornado.

Suddenly, the Bayesian was gone. “She’s gone,” Börner said. At first, he and his crew wondered if the yacht had simply drifted away. Börner’s first officer insisted that he sank. “I said nonsense. It’s such a big ship. OMG.”

Three days later, Italian divers were still struggling inside the wreckage of the Bayesian, some 50 meters below the surface. Of the 22 people on board, one was confirmed dead and six were still missing, including Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter and Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer.

The Bayesian had sailed off the northern coast of Sicily before anchoring outside the port of Porticello, a small fishing village east of Palermo.

The trip was meant to be a celebration, a family vacation to draw a line under a torrid period for Lynch. Just months before the disaster, the 59-year-old was facing up to 25 years in a US prison.

The entrepreneur had been fighting accusations that he defrauded Hewlett Packard Co. to overpay for his software firm Autonomy Corp. In June, a jury in San Francisco found him not guilty. Lynch was still fighting the Silicon Valley giant in a civil case in London, but felt he had been given a “second life”.

In the morning the Bayesian sank, the local fisherman Fabio Cefalù had ventured out to sea. But he decided to turn around and head back to port. The water was getting too rough. Half an hour later, the storm hit Porticello.

“The whole town was upside down, all the tables and restaurants were upside down,” said GiuseppeCefalù, Fabio’s brother who stayed ashore. “A garbage can was pushed into the middle of the street.” The extreme event lasted 10 to 12 minutes, they said.

Around 4:20 a.m., the Bayesian sent out a flare, Fabio said. The yacht took about 60 seconds to sink, according to sightings and footage from a security camera. Porticello fishermen began a three-hour rescue attempt at the urging of port authorities about 20 minutes later, Cefalù added. They found mattresses, boat furniture and what they believe is one of the ship’s four radar components.

Near where the Bayesian sank, Börner saw first the pieces of ship’s parts, then a flashing light that drew them to a life raft. They housed 15 people, including a child. Four of them were injured.

Börner’s crew brought the rescued back to their ship and gave them dry clothes and towels, tea and coffee and some food. The sun had risen by the time the local coast guard arrived to retrieve the injured. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, did not want to go, Börner said. He assumed she was still in shock. “She stayed on our boat,” he said.

The yacht, built by Italian shipbuilder Perini Navi, was launched in 2008 and was last refurbished in 2020. According to her brochure, she had the second tallest sailing mast in the world at 72 meters tall. Guests slept in luxury cabins clustered around the center of the yacht. It was capable of long-distance sailing with a range of up to 3,600 nautical miles (4,140 mi).

Prosecutors in Sicily have opened an investigation into the sinking. Officials will examine whether the keel was raised, which would make the ship more susceptible to heeling, before it was flooded, a person familiar with the matter said. Prosecutors declined to comment.

“A keel would have prevented some of the heeling, its weight being designed to pull the boat up,” said Jae Jones, who was a senior inspector at Britain’s Maritime Accident Investigation Branch, or MAIB. “It also acts as a break and reduces sway even at anchor.”

As the yacht was a UK-flagged vessel, the MAIB sent four inspectors to Sicily to carry out a preliminary assessment, a spokesman for the Department for Transport said. They arrived at the scene on Monday and spoke with local authorities and emergency services crews to determine if they needed their own investigation.

The weather phenomenon that hit the ship is called a waterspout. Usually 2 to 3 meters in width, they are not uncommon in Italy in late summer, driven by the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Jones described it as “like a swirling mass of wind and water passing over the deck”.

Italy experiences more than 100 “tornadic events” a year, said Andrew Pedrini, a meteorologist at Atmospheric G2 meteorologist. However, offshore marine spills are often not reported. In coastal areas, strong winds can pick up, then die down in seconds with little warning, according to a fellow superyacht captain who asked not to be named discussing the tragic events.

Commenting on whether the tragedy could have been foreseen, Salvo Cocina, head of Sicily’s Civil Protection Agency, said only the level of probability could have been predicted. It was impossible to calculate when and where such weather would hit, he said. Warming seas have increased the severity of such events, Cocina added.

For now, rescue efforts continue in Porticello. Local media reported on Wednesday that small teams of divers were able to access the interior sections of the craft.

Ashore, TV presenters from around the world set up on a jetty overlooking one of the emergency operations bases, just below a monument to the Virgin Mary meant to protect sailors.

Börner, the captain of the schooner, was concerned that part of the Bayesian was open, which could explain how it sank so quickly. It was one of the first questions asked of one of the rescued crew members. “He said it was closed,” Börner said. “He himself was really surprised that it sank so quickly.”

Copyright 2024 Bloomberg.