The majestic Bayesian superyacht, which foundered last year off Sicily, killing seven people, was likely knocked over by an intense gust of wind and sank within minutes, according to a preliminary investigation by British maritime authorities.
As the storm approached, a young deckhand on watch delayed waking up the captain and instead posted a video of the squall on his social media feed, the investigation found.
The result was a fast-moving catastrophe — just minutes, from when the skipper was roused to the ship going down — in which the storm ripped apart a protective awning on the bridge, pushed the enormous yacht all the way over onto its side and sent passengers and crew members scrambling in the dark for their lives as water began to cascade through the cabins.
“The findings indicate that the extreme wind experienced by Bayesian was sufficient to knock the yacht over,” said Capt. Andrew Moll, the chief inspector of marine accidents for the Marine Accident Investigation Branch, a British agency. “Once the yacht had heeled beyond an angle of 70 degrees, the situation was irrecoverable.”
The report noted that the Bayesian’s signature feature, its gigantic single mast, one of the tallest in the world, increased the vulnerability of the boat capsizing in high winds. The New York Times published similar findings last year in its own investigation of the accident and found that the Bayesian was an outlier. All the other boats in the same series, from the same Italian manufacturer, had two masts instead of one.
The company claimed that when operated properly, the Bayesian was “unsinkable.”
Outside experts who read the government agency’s report also pointed to the mast and said that the overall stability of the boat — from its ballast to its superstructure — was questionable at best.
“You have this obscenely tall mast, so the center of gravity of the boat is very high,” said Tad Roberts, a Canadian naval architect with decades of experience designing yachts. “The reality is that you’ve set up this system to fail.”
Several passengers who survived the capsizing were badly injured before being dumped into the sea, the report said. One couple escaped their cabin by climbing on top of a set of drawers to reach the cabin’s door. With the boat turned completely on its side, that door was now a hatch in the ceiling. As the boat went down, crew members thrashed through the sea and helped save any passengers they could reach.
Seven people trapped below deck died: Michael Lynch, a British tech tycoon; his teenage daughter, Hannah; four of Mr. Lynch’s friends, including a prominent lawyer and his wife; and the sailboat’s cook.
The report, released at midnight London time on Thursday, comes amid several simultaneous investigations. Sicilian prosecutors have launched their own inquiry and named the yacht’s captain and two crew members as suspects.
British authorities cautioned that a fuller picture will emerge only after the Bayesian is lifted from its resting place in a cove 160 feet deep, just off the harbor of Porticello, a small fishing community in Sicily. Investigators want to inspect the hull, but the salvaging process that had started this month came to a halt last week after one of the divers died while working underwater.
The basic finding of the report is that storm gusts striking the super-tall mast, which rose 237 feet, and its rigging, were sufficient to capsize and sink the vessel in minutes. The wind forces were powerful enough to knock over the yacht even though the sails were furled at the time, investigators found.
Those calculations, with slightly different technical assumptions, closely follow a study by Guillermo Gefaell, a Spanish naval engineer, and one of his colleagues, Juan Manuel López, which was first reported by The Times.
“The most important thing is that that vessel was not prepared to handle a wind of 60 knots or more,” Mr. Gefaell said in an interview on Wednesday, referring specifically to when the wind strikes the boat from the side, the sails are furled and the keel is up. “The crew could have done nothing. They did a lot, with the people that they saved.”
According to analysis of the weather at the time of the accident, the winds likely reached speeds of at least 64 knots, or 74 miles an hour, enough to capsize the boat. The report also said that “tornadic waterspouts and downdrafts were possible.”
The 10-page report is written in dry, technical language. Still, it delivers a sense of the impending doom.
The drama began last June after Mr. Lynch was acquitted in a high-stakes criminal trial in which he was accused of fraudulently inflating the value of his software company when he sold it to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion. To celebrate his win, he organized several cruises on the Bayesian, a gleaming blue, 184-foot-long superyacht that drew stares wherever it went. The boat was registered in the United Kingdom, one of the reasons British authorities are investigating.
On Aug. 14, according to the report, the Bayesian set sail from the port of Milazzo in Sicily. Twelve passengers and 10 crew members were aboard. The cruise was set to end on the morning of Aug. 19.
On the last night, the Bayesian’s crew received warnings of thunderstorms and decided to motor toward Porticello, which lies on a sheltered cove. The Bayesian’s captain, James Cutfield, an experienced New Zealand skipper, told his deckhands to wake him if the winds increased above 20 knots, or 23 miles per hour.
At 3 a.m. on Aug. 19, just a few hours before Mr. Lynch and his guests were supposed to get off the yacht and head home, the deckhand on watch saw thunderclouds moving closer, the report said. At 3:55 a.m., the deckhand, Matthew Griffiths, who is in his early 20s, recorded a video of the approaching storm and posted it to Instagram. He noted the wind had increased to 30 knots — 10 more than the threshold for waking the captain. At 4 a.m., he woke the captain.
That began an intense scramble among the crew and guests. According to the report, the chief engineer readied the boat to maneuverer into the wind, which would make it more stable. The captain rushed up to the fly bridge, from where he could steer. Angela Bacares, Mr. Lynch’s wife and the Bayesian’s owner, left her cabin and headed to the bridge to check if the taxis arranged for 8 a.m. that morning would have to be canceled because of the weather.
The wind suddenly increased, the report said, and before the captain had a chance to turn the boat in the right direction, it “violently heeled over to 90 degrees.”
In the next few minutes, the superyacht sank. Several crew members were initially trapped underwater in air pockets but managed to free themselves and swim clear of the vessel. They then plucked passengers from the sea and pulled them onto a life raft, where they helped bandage wounds. The survivors were soon rescued by another yacht in the cove, an old, converted tugboat that weathered the storm just fine.
An operating manual on board the Bayesian, called the “stability book,” did not contain critical data that the boat was dangerously prone to capsizing if it were struck by high winds while at anchor. In that condition, the boat’s guard was essentially down, with its retractable keel raised and engine vents open, which could let in water with the boat on its side.
Investigators also found that the so-called “angle of vanishing stability” — the angle at which the boat can no longer right itself — was 70.6 degrees, far less than for many sailboats that can tilt all the way on their sides, to 90 degrees or more, and still recover.
Mr. Roberts said the Bayesian’s design was “sadly lacking.”
The Italian Sea Group, a ship building company that bought Perini Navi, the makers of the Bayesian, declined to comment. A representative for the Lynches said the family wasn’t commenting either.
The report made no mention of the manufacturer’s claim, repeated for weeks, that a large hatch on the left side of the hull had been inappropriately left open by the crew, allowing water to rush in and sink the ship. The report made it clear that the ship sank on its right side and that the crew closed a number of hatches when the storm hit.
The family of Recaldo Thomas, the cook who died, known as Rick, said they were troubled by the findings.
They said in a statement provided by their lawyer that the report outlined a series of failures — “failures in the design, safety certification and seaworthiness of the Bayesian, as well as the management by some of the crew.”
The Thomas family said that they “firmly believe that Rick died doing his job, and that his death was preventable.”
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome
Jeffrey Gettleman is an international correspondent based in London covering global events. He has worked for The Times for more than 20 years.
James Glanz is a Times international and investigative reporter covering major disasters, conflict and deadly failures of technology.
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