Matteo Cannia was sitting on a bench overlooking the sea in Porticello at midnight last Sunday. It was too hot to sleep.
The 78-year-old, who has been a fisherman since he was 10, saw the first flashes of lightning. “I heard the thunder and the wind and decided to go home,” he said.
“As the storm grew, everyone woke up. Water was coming into my friend’s house.”
At around 4:15 a.m. local time, Fabio Cefalù, a fisherman who was due to go out on that wild Monday morning, suddenly saw the light of a flare.
Although he had decided not to set sail, he changed his mind and went out to sea to find out what was happening, only to find cushions and wooden planks floating.
The luxury yacht Bayesian, moored just a few hundred metres away, had already sunk.
It all happened in a span of 16 minutes of disaster, chaos and torment, which brought a quiet fishing port of Sicily to the headlines of international media.
Of the 22 people on board the Bayesian (12 passengers and 10 crew), 15 managed to board a life raft when the yacht began to capsize. The other 7 never made it out.
Charlotte Golunski, a British woman, fell into the water with her one-year-old daughter Sophie.
Golunski said she held her baby in the air with all her might to prevent him from drowning. “It was pitch black around me and all I could hear was the screams of others.”
She, her baby and her husband James were on the list of those rescued by the captain of a nearby sailboat. Trapped inside the sinking Bayesian was his colleague Mike Lynch, one of the UK’s leading technology entrepreneurs, nicknamed “the British Bill Gates”.
Luxury turned into terror
Lynch had gathered family, friends and colleagues for an idyllic holiday on his luxury yacht – a sumptuous 56-metre sailing ship that won design awards and had the tallest aluminium mast in the world.
In June, Lynch was acquitted after a lengthy trial in the United States where he had been accused of fraudulently inflating the value of his companyAutonomy, before selling it to Hewlett Packard in 2011. The trip was planned to celebrate his freedom and commemorate his rehabilitation in the public eye.
Three days after the yacht sank, divers recovered her body from the wreckage.
The body of his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, who was due to start at Oxford University next month, was recovered a day later. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, survived.
The dead include Morgan Stanley investment bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy; Lynch’s attorney Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda; and the yacht’s chef, Recaldo Thomas.
The Lynch family released a statement saying they are in “indescribable pain” and “devastated and in shock.”
Judicial investigation
The fact that the yacht sank so quickly while other smaller boats nearby survived the storm unscathed has left experts stunned.
At a news conference this weekend, the first public statement by officials since the disaster, local prosecutors said they had launched an investigation into possible crimes of involuntary manslaughter and shipwreck due to negligence.
The region’s state prosecutor, Ambrogio Cartosio, told reporters that while the investigation was at a very early stage and no one specific was being investigated, there was “a high possibility of guilt.”
“It could be just the captain. It could be the whole crew. We’re not ruling anything out at all.”
A small team of British marine researchers was also sent to Sicily to work with their Italian counterparts.
Prosecutors warned that they believe a downburst (or burst) was the weather phenomenon that hit the ship: a powerful, localized wind that descends from a storm and spreads unpredictably.
This explanation contradicts previous reports that had identified the cause as a waterspout or mini tornado at sea.
Either way, It is clear that extreme weather played a major role.
The crucial 16-minute window
Much of the investigative team’s attention is focused, of course, on the conduct of the captain, 51-year-old New Zealander James Cutfield.
Cutfield survived, along with eight members of his crew, and is being questioned.
“We didn’t see it coming,” he told Italian media in his only public comment so far, referring to the storm.
The problem is that many others did.Violent winds and rain were forecast after days of scorching heat. The director of the company that built the Bayesian, Giovanni Costantino, told the BBC he was convinced a chain of errors had accumulated on board.
“There must have been an open hatch at the back of the boat, but perhaps also a side entrance for water to enter,” he said.
“Before the storm, the captain should have closed all the openings, then raised anchor, started the engine, pointed into the wind and lowered the keel.”
The keel is a large, fin-like part of the boat that protrudes from its base.
“This would have stabilized the ship, they would have been able to sail through the storm and continue sailing comfortably,” he said.
However, rescuers found the wreck of the Bayesian 50 metres underwater with its nearly 10-metre-long keel raised.
Had it been deployed, it could have helped counteract the wind buffeting the 75-metre-high aluminium mast and kept the boat stable.
But without the keel, experts told the newspaper The Republic that Gusts of 100 kilometres per hour would have been enough to overturn the ship.and Monday’s storm far exceeded that speed.
“The Bayesian was a model for many other vessels due to its stability and exceptionally high performance”“There was absolutely no problem with that,” Costantino said. “If there was no water in it, it was unsinkable.”
Costantino said it took 16 minutes between the ship’s power going out at 3:56 a.m., showing water was flooding areas with electrical circuits, and the loss of the GPS signal, which indicates when the ship sank.
Researchers will closely study that period, along with any measures taken to mitigate extreme weather, especially once they locate the black box of the ship.
The Night Watch
Rino Casilli, one of Sicily’s leading naval experts, also believes that The errors may have made the yacht vulnerable to extreme weather conditions.
“There had to be two crew members taking turns to stand watch overnight, given the storm warning,” he said as he took me out on his boat, about a third the size of the Bayesian.
“And it should have been moored in the port, not at sea.”
Prosecutors say they believe a person was on guard at the cabin that night.
From Casilli’s sailboat we gained rare access to the site where the Bayesian sank.
An Italian police boat circled around us, warning us to turn back. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity among the divers as other rescue boats arrived.
We didn’t know it at the time, but they had just located more bodies.
“An 18-story building filled with water”
Recovering people trapped in the rubble was an intense and challenging operation for rescue teams.
Given the depth of 50 meters underwater, each diver was allowed to descend for only 10 minutes and then resurface for safety. Therefore, 120 dives were carried outThey were assisted by remote-controlled vehicles that could operate on the seabed for much longer periods of time.
At this weekend’s press conference, rescuers said that Passengers trapped inside during the sinking took refuge in cabins on the left side of the shipwhere the last air bubbles formed.
Five of the bodies were found in the first cabin on the left, while the last body, who was identified as Hannah Lynch, was in the third cabin on the left.
Access for emergency crews was extremely difficult as the yacht remained largely intact and its furnishings obstructed entry.
The coast guard compared it to “a 18-story building filled with water”As Hannah Lynch’s body was brought ashore, port emergency workers applauded their colleagues.
The seven dead have been transported to a morgue for autopsies.
The rescue teams They will now have to decide whether and how to salvage the remains of the ship.which would undoubtedly offer vital clues about what happened.
But bringing Bayesian to the surface could take six to eight weeks and cost 15 million euros (about $17 million), according to some estimates.
The search for clarity
While the painstaking work of the divers to recover the dead has ended, Investigators’ painful search for answers is just beginning.
Both researchers and survivors are staying in a hotel near Porticello, which is strictly forbidden to journalists. Security guards immediately asked us to leave.
Solving the riddle of what happened to the Bayesian will be crucial not only to help the loved ones of the victims achieve some sort of closure, but also to help the maritime industry draw conclusions.
James Cutfield’s brother, the captain, said he was a “highly respected” sailor who had worked on ships all his life.
Did the experienced sailor somehow make a series of catastrophic mistakes? The Nautilus union, which represents seafarers and captains, called for restraint in judging the Bayesian crew.
“Any attempt to question his conduct without knowing all the facts is not only unfair but also detrimental to the process of uncovering the truth and learning lessons from this tragedy,” he said.
The world’s media has begun to leave Porticello, which is slowly returning to its tranquillity. Stray cats roam among the old fishing boats and children play while their families eat in the few seaside restaurants.
But what has happened over the past week has left many here stunned and scarred.
“Last Sunday night we saw the end of the world in Porticello,” said resident Maria Vizzo.We’ve never seen anything like this before[1. Everyone here is in shock and everyone is crying.”
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