RTL Today – Tragic incident: Hell broke loose: Sicily yacht sank in heavy storm

It was still dark when a storm hit the Sicilian port of Porticello early Monday and within minutes a superyacht disappeared, taking many of its occupants with it.

“All hell broke loose at around 4:00 a.m.,” local fisherman Giovanni Lococco told AFP on Tuesday as he watched rescue workers search for six missing people.

“First came the wind, then the water – it was definitely a tornado.”

British technology magnate Mike Lynch invited friends and family aboard the 56-meter sailing yacht “Bayesian” to celebrate his recent acquittal in a massive US fraud trial.

A photo posted on social media by a local bar showed the yacht in bright colors just hours before the storm.

Bad weather had been expected and the yacht was anchored about 700 meters from the harbor of Porticello, east of Palermo on Sicily's spectacular northwest coast.

The storm swept across the coast and knocked over tables, chairs and plants in front of restaurants.

But the yacht was hit by a waterspout, a kind of mini-tornado, which one expert described as “quite unprecedented”.

“We didn’t see this coming,” Captain James Catfield, one of 15 of the 22 rescued passengers and crew, told the Italian daily newspaper “La Repubblica.”

The force of the storm interrupted the video transmission to Angelo Formica's boat in Porticello, which he was monitoring from home.

– 'Gone' –

He was woken up by the noise and went to the harbor to see what was going on.

“After about 15, 20 minutes – maybe 30 at most – the boat was already gone,” he told AFP about the “Bayesian”.

He said he had seen similar hurricanes elsewhere off the coast of Sicily before.

“Once I saw a boat, a 42-foot one, that was almost submerged in the water but luckily managed to get out,” he said.

As news of the shipwreck spread, locals were called to help and rushed to the water.

“But we didn't find anyone in the sea, we only found pillows and the remains of the boat,” fisherman Fabio Cefalu told AFP.

Karsten Borner, the captain of another yacht anchored nearby, said there was a “very strong hurricane gust” and he had to fight to keep his ship stable.

Suddenly “we noticed that the ship had disappeared behind us,” he told journalists in Porticello.

Charlotte Golunski, 35, a colleague of Lynch, was on deck when the yacht sank and momentarily lost her frightening grip on her one-year-old daughter.

She grabbed them again and managed to climb onto a life raft. “Many people were screaming,” she told Italian media.

Her partner James Emslie and Lynch's wife Angela Bacares also survived with the help of the coast guard and private boats.

However, the body of a man reportedly the yacht's cook was found, while Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah and four others remained missing.