Risk-taker Mike Lynch's final challenge came on a yacht that could not defy turbulent seas

Bayesian may have been built to withstand hurricanes but sank on Monday after being hit by a waterspout

British tech billionaire Mike Lynch, 59, was among those who died after the Bayesian sank off Sicily. Shutterstock

Lights on the Bayesian twinkle out at sea as the wind begins to pick up, blowing the sun lounger covers about the beach. Within seconds, the torrent of rain almost entirely obscures the yacht, which appears to tilt, and then rotates alarmingly before disappearing from view.

The scene, captured on grainy CCTV footage filmed from a coastal Sicilian villa, is believed to show the final moments of the luxury yacht, before it was engulfed by a storm off Porticello early on Monday.

“We didn’t see it coming,” the yacht’s captain James Cutfield told La Repubblica from his hospital bed.

He was among 15 of the 22 people on board who made it to safety.

The body of ship’s chef Ricardo Thomas was found on Monday and rescuers have since recovered five others from the wreck: British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, Morgan Stanley International bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda. The body of Mr Lynch’s daughter Hannah, 18, was recovered on Friday.

At 3am on Monday on the nearby Sir Robert Baden Powell sailing boat, Captain Karsten Borner and his crew were awake and preparing for an approaching thunderstorm that was already whipping up the waters, prompting some sailors, including fisherman Fabio Cefalu, to return to port.

Sometime after 4am, the monstrous force of the weather hit.

Residents estimate the thunderstorm has passed over within 10 or 12 minutes but it slammed into Porticello with such force that it turned the town “upside down”, pushing a rubbish lorry into the middle of the street.

Out at sea, Mr Borner and his crew had to work hard to keep the Sir Robert Baden Powell upright, running the engine at full power, just to hold it steady through wind and rain so violent the captain assumed it was a tornado.

Angela Bacares, 57, Mr Lynch’s wife, has said her first sign that anything was amiss on board was when the yacht tilted sharply at 4am, waking the couple.

Although initially not worried, she headed out of the cabin to see what was happening, suffering cuts to her feet from shattered glass that have left her temporarily unable to walk.

At 4.20am, Mr Cefalu saw the Bayesian send out a flare.

Within minutes, the luxury vessel was lying 50 metres beneath the waves.

It is believed the heavy storm that raged outside spawned a waterspout, a black swan freak event, that sank the ship.

Engulfed

“It was as if the world just split open,” one witness said.

“Everything was peaceful and then, in an instant, the storm hit us like a thunderbolt. The yacht – gone in what felt like seconds.”

A crew member told Boat International the yacht was struck by freak weather that caused it to tilt heavily and fast. It sank in only 12 minutes.

Mr Lynch was hosting a celebration of his recent acquittal of fraud charges in the US, with many of the guests involved the tycoon’s defence. During his decade and more of legal battles how often must his mind have shifted to the magnificent superyacht, built for speed and almost bound to impress even the richest of his peers?

After leaving San Francisco a free man, defying the odds of acquittal in a federal court that are longer than one in 200, his mind was set on a summer of celebration aboard his prized boat. Instead, he, his daughter and two other couples were consigned to the briny deep in a most cruel twist of fate.

The slick yacht, which had won several design awards, featured a minimalist-style interior with luxury cabins clustered around the centre and a colour scheme of cream, beige, brown and terracotta.

Its distinctive outward appearance – featuring the world’s second-tallest sailing mast, at 72 metres – had earned it a nod for best exterior styling at the World Superyacht Awards.

Divers search sunken superyacht Bayesian – in pictures

Originally owned by Dutch property developer John Groenewoud, who bought it for £30 million ($39.3 million), it was built by Italian shipyard Perini Navi, with the help of boat designer Ron Holland Design.

Mr Groenewoud sold it in 2014 and it is now owned by Revtom, a company owned by Ms Bacares.

The Bayesian, which was built to withstand hurricanes, underwent a major refit in 2020, when it was rumoured to have been equipped with advanced navigation systems, a new luxury interior and updated safety measures. The mast was also reportedly removed and reinstalled.

Although a crew member told Boat International that no one remembers the mast snapping, some experts have suggested it could have made the yacht more vulnerable.

Skip Novak, a lifelong sailor who has taken part in numerous round-the-world yacht races and written books about sailing, said he believed that strong gusts probably pushed the yacht over 90 degrees to its side, and the vessel did not recover because of the weight of the huge mast and because it was anchored.

Batten the hatches

He told The National: "I know those boats because I was on a sister ship some years ago, I did a regatta down in the Antarctic on one. The boat is bombproof, as much as you could build a boat.

"But the vulnerability for me was the boat sank so quickly. So obviously it was down-flooded, meaning that water had entered at deck level. One of the vulnerable parts of that boat ... it has very big windows, on the side decks to the pilot house.

"If you threw the boat on its side you could imagine that those windows could have been shoved in. This is pure speculation. But it would have created a hole big enough to sink the ship in pretty short order."

The chief executive of the firm that built the Bayesian said the yacht was “virtually unsinkable”.

Giovanni Costantino, founder and chief executive of The Italian Sea Group, told Corriere della Sera: “The passengers reported something absurd, that the storm came unexpectedly, suddenly. That is not true. Everything was predictable.

“Ask yourself – why were none of the Porticello fishermen out that night? The disturbance was completely readable on all the weather maps. It was impossible not to know. A Perini vessel survived Hurricane Katrina. You don’t think it could survive a tornado like this?”

An initial external inspection of the vessel suggests the hull is free of leaks, with the aluminium mast intact and a partially raised keel.

The keel acts as a counterweight, to lower the centre of gravity of the boat, Matthew Schanck, chairman of the Maritime Search and Rescue Council, told The National.

“Navigationally it was safe to have the keel deployed, to have it down, since it was anchored in 50 metres of water. It also helps with stability and comfort. It would also make it less likely to capsize by lowering the centre of gravity.

“From a safety perspective I would have expected the keel to be down."

The position of the keel will be a key element of the investigation into what went wrong, he said.

Investigators are also likely to look at the design of the yacht and the impact of its super-tall mast, which would have been tested during the design process with software.

“If it’s a new design I would expect them to do some small-scale modelling and testing. But that’s not going to reflect the reality of a 75-metre mast,” said Mr Schanck.

“So they will be looking at the calculations in the software and they will do all that and make sure it sits within the international maritime regulations for stability and construction, which it obviously did because it was certified by the maritime coastguard agency.”

The vessel’s hatches and the weather will both form key aspects of the investigation, by the UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch.

Summer storms

Witness reports suggest, and experts believe, the most likely cause of the accident was a waterspout, a mini tornado that can form during severe thunderstorms over a body of water.

But it is important that it is confirmed by investigators, because the yacht should have been able to withstand the other possibility – a squall, which is a short, but intense burst of weather, a “pretty normal event to experience at sea”, Mr Schanck said.

“If it was a squall that happened, I would be asking a lot of questions,” he said. “I would have concerns about stability, construction, decisions made.”

Waterspouts, however, are more extreme and cannot be predicted. According to the US National Ocean Service, there are two types of waterspouts – fair-weather and tornadic.

Tornadic waterspouts “have the same characteristics as a land tornado. They are associated with severe thunderstorms, and are often accompanied by high winds and seas, large hail, and frequent dangerous lightning”, the service says on its website.

Waterspouts are very common in the Mediterranean in the summer, when the water is warm, said Mr Novak, who has seen many in the area, but never been hit by one – although he has been close.

"They appear out of nowhere," he told The National. "You see them in the distance and they move around and you keep an eye on them. Occasionally they do pass over a vessel, by law of averages.

"They cut a very narrow path of destruction."

Average monthly surface temperatures have been at record highs for months. Hotter air can hold more moisture, making heavier storms more likely.

Sicily has been baking under intense heat this summer, and the United Nations’ panel of climate change experts notes the Mediterranean Sea is particularly vulnerable to climate change, with warming rates roughly 20 per cent higher than the global average.

Climate change is expected to lead to more extreme weather – and by consequence possibly more waterspouts.

“If it was a waterspout, that is that black swan event,” said Mr Schanck. “What could we really do to plan and mitigate that? Not a lot.”