Specialist Italian divers on Tuesday launched a new search for six people, including United Kingdom’s tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his teenage daughter, who have been missing since their yacht capsized off Italy’s Sicily.
The British-flagged yacht, called Bayesian, was anchored some 700 metres from port, with 22 people, including 10 crew members on board, when it was struck by a waterspout, a sort of mini tornado, AFP reported.
The incident occurred at dawn on Monday.
According to Salvo Cocina, head of the Civil Protection Agency in Sicily, Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares was among 15 people rescued, but the businessman and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were still unaccounted for.
Firefighter divers trained to work in tight spaces were flown in from Rome and Sardinia late Monday, but a first search of the wreck some 50 metres below the sea surface failed.
“Access was limited only to the bridge, with difficulty due to the presence of furniture obstructing passage”, the firefighters said on X.
The 180-foot long luxury vessel was moored off Porticello, east of Palermo, when violent winds and rains suddenly swept up the coast, AFP reported.
“It was terrible. The boat was hit by really strong wind and shortly after it went down,” a British survivor named Charlotte Golunski told ANSA news agency.
Golunski lost hold of her one-year-old daughter in the waves “for two seconds”, before managing to grab her “while the sea raged”, she said.
“Lots of people were screaming” in the dark, said Golunski, who managed to get on a life raft.
A waterspout is a column that descends from a cloud to form a rotating mixture of wind and water over a body of water, often during severe thunderstorms.