Two bodies were found on Wednesday in the wreck of the luxury yacht Bayesian British tech tycoon Mike Lynch’s shipwreck off Sicily on Monday, further diminishing the chances of finding survivors.
These two bodies, found early in the afternoon but not identified at this stage, bring the death toll to three, after the discovery on Monday of a first deceased man.
Shortly before the discovery of the bodies was announced, an AFP journalist saw more than half a dozen boats leaving the port of Porticello, the site of the shipwreck east of Palermo, within minutes of each other.
Some of them returned later, one carrying a body bag which was then transferred to a tent on the quayside.
Search operations continue to find the four missing people who were on board the sailboat, now lying on its right side at a depth of 50 metres, 700 metres from the port of Porticello. But the operation is “long and complicated” according to the firefighters.
On Wednesday morning, in calm seas, the divers reached the search area in small inflatable boats, taking turns in teams of two.
However, a coastguard official, Captain Vincenzo Zagarola, had already declared on Italian radio on Tuesday that it was “difficult to imagine” that the search could end well.
But experts have pointed out that yachts such as the Bayesian were designed with watertight doors that could create air pockets allowing a chance of survival for a certain time.
“There have been cases of survivors in these kinds of air pockets,” recalled Jean-Baptiste Souppez, a British engineering expert and fellow of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, in a commentary provided by the Science Media Centre.
He cited the case of Nigerian sailor Harrison Okene, who was rescued in 2013 after spending nearly three days trapped in an air pocket after his ship capsized in rough seas off Nigeria.
“It is simply impossible to predict whether air pockets have formed on the Bayesian,” he added, however.
Apocalyptic scenes
Hours before the tornado struck at dawn on Monday, the party was in full swing on the Bayesiana 56-metre-long yacht flying the British flag with 12 passengers and 10 crew members on board.
Mike Lynch, a wealthy businessman nicknamed the “British Bill Gates”, celebrated with his friends, colleagues and lawyers his acquittal in June in a fraud trial in the United States that could have cost him many years in prison.
The ship sank within minutes and 15 people, including six passengers including a mother and her one-year-old daughter, were rescued, while one crew member was found dead.
“The word that the mother and all the injured people kept repeating was ‘darkness’, the darkness they experienced during the shipwreck,” Fabio Genco, head of the Palermo emergency services who provided first aid to the survivors, told the BBC.
“They talked about five minutes, maybe three to five minutes, between the time the boat was lifted by the waves and the time it sank. […] There were some truly apocalyptic scenes where everyone was searching and hoping to find” the missing people, he added.
The six people missing Wednesday morning were Mike Lynch and his daughter Hannah, Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, a unit of the US bank, and insurer Hiscox, and his wife, and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer who defended Mike Lynch in his US trial, and his wife.
Four people are still being sought, although it is not known who they are, pending the identification of the two bodies found.
Initial witnesses had indicated that the 75-metre mast had broken, but information available on Wednesday appears to indicate that this is not the case.
The speed at which the yacht sank, and the fact that other boats around it were not hit, raise questions, including whether the ballasted keel, which counterbalances the massive mast, was lowered or raised at the time of the storm.