CCTV shows storm battering Mike Lynch’s superyacht

Gale-force winds and waterspouts believed to have hit the 183ft-long Bayesian while it lay at anchor

CCTV captured the moment that Mike Lynch’s superyacht was battered during a ferocious storm.
The British tech tycoon’s superyacht, Bayesian, sank off Porticello, near the Sicilian city of Palermo, on Monday.
Mr Lynch, 59, and his teenage daughter, Hannah, are among the seven passengers and crew feared dead.
A storm of gale-force winds and waterspouts is believed to have hit the 183ft-long superyacht with 22 people on board at around 4am.
In dramatic new footage, it is possible to make out the Bayesian at anchor as torrential rain lashes down.
A mast is visible for a moment in the grainy monochrome video, but disappears as it succumbs to the storm.
In a second CCTV video, said to have been taken from a villa some 200m away, the boat’s lights can be seen fading to black in the bay of Porticello.
“In just 60 seconds you can see the ship disappear,” the owner of the villa told the Ansa Agency, adding: “By chance, after the uproar of the news, I looked at the cameras.
“My children told me. Of about 20 cameras installed in the house, only one was not disturbed by the wind and the rain.
“You can see clearly what is happening. There was nothing that could be done for the boat. It disappeared in a very short time”.
Another video which has not been published, shows the boat sinking, Giornale di Sicilia reported.
Salvo Cocina, of Sicily’s civil protection agency, blamed damage to the boat on a tornado forming above water, also known as a waterspout.
He added that the boat was “in the wrong place at the wrong time”.
Another theory is that a weather phenomenon called a downburst, which sees high winds and huge precipitation suddenly drop from a thunderstorm, could also have buffeted the Bayesian.
“A waterspout is a tornado over water,” said Dr David Sills, the executive director of the northern tornadoes project at Western University in Canada. “It’s a legitimate tornado, it’s just over water. The surface doesn’t really matter.”
He told The Telegraph: “The difference between a tornado and a downburst is that with a tornado you’ve got very localised wind.
“If it’s a thunderstorm that’s generating the tornado, then it could be quite intense, highly localised, high amplitude and certainly any water in the area will be stirred up and could have major implications for any ship.”
Dr Pieter Groenemeijer, director of the European Severe Storms Laboratory, added that while waterspouts were common across the Mediterranean, including Italy, they were rarely lethal.
Extreme weather killed 534 people in Europe last year, he said, with just three of them being caused by tornadoes or waterspouts.
Angela Bacares, Mr Lynch’s wife, was rescued with 14 others but rescue divers have recovered one body and six people remain missing.
Among those unaccounted for are Jonathan Bloomer, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and Christopher Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance.