Crews were working relentlessly to find the missing passengers of the doomed Bayesian yacht that capsized off the coast of Italy during a violent storm on Monday. The boat left the Sicilian port of Milazzo on Aug. 14 and was last tracked east of Palermo on Sunday evening, according to the vessel tracking app Vessel finder.
The 160-foot luxury sailboat with 22 people aboard sank off the port of Porticello when the storm struck at sunrise on Monday, the Italian coast guard said.
Fifteen of the ship’s passengers and crew survived, including a mother who was clutching her 1-year-old daughter above her head to keep her from drowning. The search for those missing was slow because the Bayesian now sat 50 meters below the surface, where divers could only stay for up to 12 minutes, fire rescue officials said in a statement on Tuesday.
British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and the five others still missing from the sunken Bayesian yacht could have been alive because of “air pockets” inside the hull, an expert claimed. Italian authorities had said that the chances of the passengers surviving the disaster were very small, but “never say never.”
One survivor of the doomed Bayesian, who was “very shaken” after escaping the superyacht’s sinking off the coast of Sicily, shared a disturbing revelation with her father. Ayla Ronald, a senior associate at the law firm Clifford Chance, was one of the 22 aboard the British-flagged ship when a tornado struck the area where it was anchored around 5 a.m. on Monday. Ronald, 36, and her partner, Matthew Fletcher, were invited aboard the Bayesian to celebrate tech tycoon Mike Lynch’s acquittal in “one of Silicon Valley’s biggest-ever fraud cases” alongside his friends and family.
