Searches resumed for a third day Wednesday (Aug 21) on the wreck of a luxury yacht that sank off Sicily, with hope fading that the six missing passengers would be found alive.
The search operation, which involves specialist divers aided by an underwater drone, continued until late on Tuesday and resumed at first light on Wednesday morning, firefighters said.
The 56m British-flagged “Bayesian” was anchored some 700m from Porticello with 10 crew and 12 passengers on board when it was struck by a waterspout – akin to a mini-tornado – before dawn on Monday.
One body was found in the hours after the sinking, believed to be the yacht’s chef, named in several media outlets as Canadian-Antiguan Recaldo Thomas. Fifteen people were rescued.
But UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his teenage daughter Hannah, his lawyer Christopher Morvillo and his wife Neda, and Jonathan Bloomer, the chair of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Judy remain missing.
AFP reporters saw a steady stream of boats on Wednesday morning going in and out of the harbour of Porticello, east of Palermo, ferrying divers to and from the search site.
Firefighters said on Tuesday evening that divers had entered the inside of the wreck, but that it was a “long and complex” operation.
The yacht is largely intact, resting on the seabed some 50m down.
Despite eyewitness testimonies that the 75m mast had snapped, reports on Wednesday suggested that it too, survived the incident.
A coastguard official, Captain Vincenzo Zagarola, had told Italian radio on Tuesday morning that it was “difficult to imagine” that the search would end well.
But experts noted that superyachts such as the “Bayesian” were designed with watertight subdivisions.
“There are records of survivors found in such air pockets,” noted Dr Jean-Baptiste Souppez, a UK engineering expert and fellow of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, in a commentary provided by the Science Media Centre.
He noted 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 the Nigerian coast.
But he added: “Whether air pockets formed on the Bayesian is simply impossible to predict.”
