The captain of a nearby boat who witnessed the Aug. 19 sinking of the luxury yacht amid a storm off the coast of Sicily says the wife of British tech billionaire Mike Lynch did not want to leave the scene until her husband and daughter were found.
“When things calmed down and the storm abated somewhat and the wind dropped a bit, we were looking around and couldn’t see the Bayesian anymore,” Karsten Borner, the captain of the Sir Robert Baden Powell, said. “We checked the AIS [automatic identification system], and we also couldn’t see the Bayesian anymore. Two passengers and two crew members saw what looked like a whale in the water and realized afterwards it was the capsized boat.”
“A moment later,” Borner continues, “I saw a triangle in the sea in a split second that the sky was lit up by lightning, and that must have been the bow of the ship while sinking over the stern.”
The Bayesian, a 183-foot craft carrying 22 people, was anchored off the coast of Porticello in Sicily when it was hit by a “violent storm” and sank, according to the Italian coast guard. The bodies of seven people, among them Lynch and his daughter Hannah, were later recovered from the sunken vessel.
Borner, whose boat was nearby, tells PEOPLE that he noticed the weather deteriorated very rapidly around 3 a.m. local time on Aug. 19.
“The weather turned very quickly and reached us even more quickly,” he says. “And the Bayesian was there at the time. It was anchored like us. We kept an eye on it. We had turned the engine on to maintain our position in case the anchor didn’t hold and were carefully watching it to keep at a distance from it as well. We were the only two ships out in the bay.”lAccording to Borner, the weather turned into heavy rain, wind and lightning for a brief period. Then, the captain and his crew saw the Bayesian sink.
Borner and a passenger saw a red flare and then a white one. It prompted Borner and his first mate to board a tender, and they headed in the direction where the Bayesianhad been. “We first found things floating in the water like cushions and chairs and stuff,” Borner continues. “And then we saw a flickering light. This was a life raft with a light on the top. And they also waved at us with a torch.”
“So we went there, and then we found the crew and part of the passengers — 15 people in a 12-person raft, including a little baby,” he adds.
The Sir Robert Baden Powell sailing ship.
Courtesy of Karsten Borner
Borner also noticed four injured people, including Lynch’s wife and Hannah’s mother, Angela Bacares. “This was after the storm had passed,” he says, “because the wind appeared very suddenly out of the blue and it also stopped very, very quickly. When it passed, it was quiet again. And that’s when we were able to go out to search.”
He learned that the crew of the Bayesiangave first aid to those in the raft. The yacht survivors later boarded his ship, and his crew took care of them. “We helped them with bandages and stuff, and dry towels and a blanket for the baby,” Borner says. “We also handed out blankets to everyone and dry clothes and so on.”
Karsten Borner, captain of the sailing boat Sir Robert Baden Powell, is pictured on a small boat in Porticello near Palermo, on August 20, 2024 a day after the British-flagged luxury yacht Bayesian sank with 22 people onboard.
ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty
The captain tells PEOPLE that he was busy contacting the coast guard and urging for medical help. “The coast guard hadn’t arrived yet at that point,” Borner says, “but when we came back with the survivors, they had already been on the VHF radio and were asking for news of the Bayesian as they too noticed it had disappeared. It took some time for them to arrive, as they have one small in Porticello and the rest came from Palermo and elsewhere.”
The survivors told Borner there were still people inside the capsized yacht, which led the tender to be sent out again. “They looked around at sea and obviously didn’t find anything,” Borner says.
Borner says that the injured survivors were taken by the Italian coast guard and brought to waiting ambulances.
“[Bacares] didn’t want to leave because her husband and her daughter were still down,” he adds. “She was picked up a little bit later because I asked the coast guard to take her as I thought she needed medical help. Then, over the course of the next two, three hours — [I] don’t know exactly how much later — the coast guards came and the rest of the Bayesian people went away with them.”
The exact cause of the yacht’s sinking remains unknown and there are several theories about what contributed to the disaster.
Ambrogio Cartosio, the Chief Prosecutor of Termini Imerese, announced on Aug. 24 that authorities were launching manslaughter and negligent shipwreck investigations in connection with the sinking.
Meanwhile, the yacht’s captain, James Cutfield, 50, of New Zealand, had been interrogated for the third time by prosecutors, as previously reported.
