Sinking of Yacht off Sicilian Coast

[Cesarina]

This is of course an absolutely tragic event.
I'm feeling a bit mean by saying this.........but why is it the headline topic on BBC news?
I genuinely feel sorry for those involved, but don't understand why it's the dominant news story?

From public reports that I have seen. It was rare that a tornado/waterspout hit them in a calm sea. These have a fairly narrow track where power is concentrated. A message with picture of sun set sent minutes before. Because it was hot and calm the hatches were open.
They were at anchor, no sails set.
As marine engineering and seamanship goes this was a "One in millions" event.

It was not new, 'lots of miles on it's clock'.
If any of above is wrong please post. We wait for detailed analysis.

It a freaky random chance that both things happened at the same time. So daft to assume it’s a conspiracy. They think that the sudden unpredictable weather (and the fact that a lot of windows might have been open in the heat) and the massive mast acting as a drag once capsized are factors. Very tragic.

Statistically, coincidences are incredibly common.

@DreamW3aver although that was the initial report, I believe the final investigation concluded none were wearing seatbelts.

I imagine we will soon find out it's cock-up not conspiracy.

The captain was 22, the (mostly) kids who crew these boats are lovely and personable but many are not sailors, they may even have done as little as a week's crew course. The industry is toxic and unregulated and many owners demand 24/7 on duty with little downtime.

I'm not saying this is the case here, and it's a terrible story, but it would not be surprising if we see that something had not been done correctly on the boat (doors left open, passengers not issued with life jackets for the anticipatory weather, etc...)

Much more likely that some kind of human action or inaction has turned what would usually be a survivable incident into a fatal one.

Yep

The sea wasn’t calm - there was a storm- check out CCTV. It sank at 5am so well after sunset - it was dark.

The BBC reporter on Breakfast news this morning has said that they will be investigating whether hatches were closed and whether the retractable keel was deployed. The comment was also made that other boats in the vicinity did not sink.

Thanks for time correction. It gave longer for sea state to worsen.

I commented in another thread that summer thunderstorms are extremely common in Italy. Literally one every 2-3 days. So if someone wanted to sabotage a boat in a way so that it sinks and won't be able to be investigated, it would be extremely predictable to just wait until the next storm. Since it happened at night there is no footage of the waterspout or the actual ship sinking. There seems to be very grainy footage of the storm but all you see is the mast still upright in the clip.

Also, the majority of waterspouts (non tornadic) are not strong at all. These occur frequently off the coast of Italy and are not comparable to a USA level tornado over water. There is zero doubt that thousands of yachts and boats moored around the coast of Italy and Croatia have been hit by waterspouts in the past. And yet there has been zero recorded case of one sinking.

My understanding is that Bayesian is far from a standard boat. It has the second largest mast in the world.

I don’t know about the boats that survived similar incidents but I don’t think that direct parallels can be drawn.

It's not HP the company, it's their shareholders. Search them up and yes, that scenario is absolutely believable. It's not about money anymore but hubris. They were taken for mugs and sold a company that was probably only worth 20% of what they paid for, whilst making the seller a billionaire in the process. Even a normal person would be angry if you got scammed this way on a smaller scale. You don't mess with the egos of extremely rich and extremely powerful people.

Which shareholder or shareholders, exactly?

A yacht expert on a R4 programme explained that the boat could have sunk very quickly if one of the lower doors was left open. It seems that a series of actions which singly wouldn't be problematic but all together caused the sinking.

The freak water spout and an open door could have made the yacht unstable enough to sink quickly.

That was my thought, keel up with a tall mast would make it very unstable. I wonder how experienced the crew were. It is british registered so expect a Marine Board of Trade enquiry possible

Institutional investors aren’t the mafia. Funds will hold shares in dozens and dozens of listed companies. Mostly looking after the money of a range of investors - quite possibly including you, through a pension fund.

We aren’t sticking horseheads in people’s beds.

To @Fluffybutterfly

The captain is reported as being 51 in the Telegraph and Times.

Seems a bit more plausible than a 22 yr old.

I think the crew probably survived because they were perhaps still working, or maybe were on deck trying to keep the boat safe. The guests were possibly asleep, and the crew didn't wake them because their job was to keep everything smoothly and this water spout thing was impossible to predict so the crew hadn't woken the guests. Some of whom may have been the worse for wear due to drinking. Which the crew wouldn't have been.

If Mike Lynch and fellow court case winner had been deliberately killed because of the court case, surely the killer(s) would have killed them before they won? To stop them winning. Not after.

On that - they weren’t expected to win, statistically, and they were being sued rather than suing.

A conspiracy doesn’t make sense, but the payout for HP would have been clawing back the money Lynch etc made in the sale, so killing them before a verdict is also illogical.

Come on now it's because they are filthy rich and western.

The young people that die crossing our channel on dinghies don't deserve the same press.

...

Yes, that does seem much more plausible! Thanks for correcting.

Coincidences do happen - there is a whole other thread about them going on right now.

One of my DDs is a mathematician and she says the word they use is synchronicity, not coincidence.

I remember hearing David Spiegelhalter, Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk once saying how poorly people in general understand statistics

You do realise the weather forecasts in the Med are notoriously unpredictable? I sailed there for five years on my yacht and its perfectly normal to get caught out by the weather.
A lot of super yachts are almost always at sea. They are often out for charter as well because they are permanently at sea and permanently crewed. If the owner fancies a jolly in the Caribbean they need to relocate.
I suspect the maib report will find the waterspout/wind pushed the yacht flat over and the garage doors were left open along with all of the hatches and campanionways allowing a huge influx of water. Its a lifting keel and at anchor so the keel was probably up so it struggled to right itself. It went down in minutes.

As another current thread on MN confirms, coincidences happen all the time.