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PORTICELLO, Sicily (AP) — Divers searching the wreckage of a superyacht that sank off Sicily found the bodies of five passengers on Wednesday and were searching for another, as doubts grew about why the yacht sank so quickly while a nearby sailboat emerged largely unscathed.
Rescuers unloaded three body bags from a rescue boat that pulled into the port of Porticello. Salvatore Cocina, director of Sicily’s civil protection agency, said two other bodies were found in the wreckage, for a total of five.
Maritime experts said the discovery showed that the search for the hull on the seabed 50 meters (164 feet) underwater quickly turned into a salvage operation rather than a rescue effort because of the time that had passed and the lack of any signs of life during three days of searching.
A 56-meter (184-foot) British-flagged yacht sank in the storm early Monday while anchored about a kilometer (half a mile) offshore. Civil protection officials said they believed the vessel was hit by a tornado over the water, a so-called waterspout, and sank quickly.
Fifteen people escaped in lifeboats and were rescued by a nearby sailboat. One body was found on Monday – that of the ship’s cook, Recardo Thomas of Antigua.
Thomas was born in Canada but visited his parents’ native Antigua as a child and moved permanently to the eastern Caribbean island in his early 20s, according to his cousin, David Isaac. Italian officials had previously listed Antigua as the nationality of one of the passengers on the ship.
The search effort was driven by the fate of six missing passengers, including British tech magnate Mike Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter and a colleague who successfully defended him in a recent U.S. federal fraud trial.
A spokesman for Lynch did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Meanwhile, investigators from the Termini Imerese prosecutor’s office are gathering evidence for their criminal investigation, which they launched immediately after the tragedy, although no formal suspects have been publicly identified.
There are many questions about what caused the superyacht, built in 2008 by Italian shipyard Perini Navi, to sink so quickly, while the nearby Sir Robert Baden Powell sailboat was largely spared and survivors were successfully rescued.
Could it be that a waterspout suddenly appeared, causing the ship to flip sideways and water to pour in through the open hatches? How would the keel of a large sailing vessel like the Bayes be positioned? Perhaps a retractable keel to allow entry into shallower ports?
“There is still a lot of uncertainty about whether the ship had a lifting keel and whether it might have been raised,” said Jean-Baptiste Souppez, a fellow of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Nautical Technology. “But if it had a lifting keel, the stability of the ship would have been reduced and it would have been more likely to capsize,” he said in an interview.
The captain of the schooner Sir Robert Baden Powell, which came to rescue the Bayes family, said his vessel sustained minimal damage — the frame of the awning broke — though he estimated the winds to be 12 on the Beaufort scale, the highest intensity of a hurricane.
He said he had stayed at anchor and kept the engine running to try to maintain the boat’s position as the predicted storm approached.
“Another possibility would be to drop anchor before the storm and sail downwind on the high seas,” Karsten Bohner said in a text message. But he said that might not be a viable option given the Bayes’ iconic 75-meter (246-foot) mast.
“If there are stability issues because the mast is too high, it won’t be any better for sailing on the high seas,” he said.
Yachts like the Bayes need to have watertight compartments that are specially designed to prevent a rapid, catastrophic sinking even if some parts take on water.
“The speed at which the ship sank indicated that water would soon enter the ship, and that water was entering the ship in multiple locations, which again indicated that the ship may have capsized,” Supez said.
The Italian Coast Guard and Fire and Rescue divers continued the underwater search in dangerous and time-consuming conditions. Due to the great depth of the wreck, special precautions were required and the two-person team could only spend about 12 minutes at a time searching.
Part of the reason for limiting dive time is to avoid decompression sickness, also known as “compression sickness,” which occurs when nitrogen dissolved in the blood forms bubbles when a diver stays underwater too long and ascends too quickly.
“The longer you stay in, the slower you have to ascend,” said Simon Rogerson, editor of SCUBA magazine. He said the tight turnaround times showed that operations managers were trying to limit risk and recovery time after each dive.
“It sounds like they were operating basically with no decompression or very tight decompression, or they were operating very conservatively,” he said.
Additionally, the divers were working in extremely confined spaces, surrounded by floating debris, with limited visibility and carrying oxygen tanks on their backs.
“We’re trying to move in a small space, but anything can slow us down,” said Luca Cali, a spokesman for the Fire and Rescue Department. “One electrical panel can delay us for five hours. This is not a normal situation. We are at our limit.”
“It’s not a matter of entering the cabin to check,” he added. “They’ve reached the cabin level, but you can’t open the door,” he said.
The Italian Coast Guard said it had reinforced its diving teams and was using underwater remote-controlled robots that can stay underwater for six to seven hours at a time, recording their surroundings.
The lack of signs of life and the discovery of bodies led outside experts to conclude that the search was now simply a recovery effort and investigation to determine why the tragedy had occurred.
“There were a lot of divers around the ship, but they couldn’t find any signs of life inside the ship, which I don’t think is a particularly good sign,” Supez said.
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