The tragic shipwreck of a luxury yacht moored off the coast of Sicily is the latest sign that the Mediterranean is becoming a more dangerous sea to sail in, those who know the waters best have said
One man died and six people are still missing, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, after the Bayesian, a 56-metre-long (184-ft) sailboat, was hit by a ferocious storm on Monday, sinking in a matter of minutes.
The coast guard said bad weather had been forecast, but added that it was more virulent than expected. Some locals spoke of a waterspout, or sea whirlwind, of exceptional force. “It was a strange thing,” fisherman Andrea Carini told Reuters. The Bayesian was at anchor, its sails down, when the tempest hit, with another yacht moored nearby.
Climatologists say global warming is making such violent and unexpected tempests more frequent in a sea used as a summer playground for millions of tourists, including a wealthy few sailing its waters on superyachts.
Luca Mercalli, president of Italy’s meteorological society, said the sea surface temperature around Sicily in the days leading up to the shipwreck was about 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), almost three degrees more than normal.
“This creates an enormous source of energy that contributes to these storms,” he told Reuters.
The changes in “Mare Nostrum” (Our Sea), as the ancient Romans called the Mediterranean, are also being noticed by experienced skippers such as Massimo Aramu, who runs the Akua sailing school on the coast near the Italian capital.
Currently sailing around Greece, Aramu said he did not like navigating Italy’s Tyrrhenian coast around Sicily or the Spanish Balearic islands because there are “often critical situations with little warning”.
Last week, a storm similar to the one that sank the Bayesian hit the Balearic archipelago, which includes the islands of Ibiza and Mallorca, leaving several yachts washed up ashore.
Giuliano Gallo, a former skipper who crossed the Atlantic and has written several books on sailing, said the Mediterranean was becoming more like the Caribbean, which has areas that many boats steer clear of at certain times of the year.
“But things are less predictable in the Mediterranean,” he said.
This week, in many areas of Greece, sailors have been hit by extreme heat followed by thunderstorms that saw thousands of lightning strikes. A video has also gone viral of a waterspout, similar to that seen near the tragedy in Sicily, off the coast of the island of Zakynthos in the Ionian Sea.
It was captured by a British tourist on holiday.
Another sign of the more erratic weather in the Mediterranean was seen a year ago when thousands of people were killed in Libya by flash floods triggered by a so-called medicane – a supercharged Mediterranean storm fuelled by warmer seas.
Karsten Borner, the captain of a boat that was moored alongside the Bayesian but escaped harm, said Monday’s storm had been “very violent, very intense, a lot of water and I think a turning system like a tornado”.
He also blamed more frequent episodes of intense heat during the summer months for playing a role in causing such storms.
“The water is … way too hot for the Mediterranean and this causes for sure heavy storms, like we had one week ago on the Balearics, like we had two years ago in Corsica and so on,” he said.