yacht sunk in med

'standard' Yacht

The Aero- and Hydromechanics of Keel Yachts https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-13275-4

Total HydroDynamic Yaw Moment with Yaw/Leeway and Roll/Heel ... and ... (Achtung !) ... without Pitch

0.20 (Cm) x dynamic pressure 7 x 7 (14 knots Down a Big Wave) x 0.5 x 1025 (sea water density) x a Yacht 7 m^3 Displacement

=

(drum roll)

35,000 (!!!) Newton meters

OMFG

 

»Bayesian« Drama: These Are Perhaps the Last Photos of the Sunken Ship - DER SPIEGEL

 

In the great Portuguese Air Force rescue operation Azores 2015 ...

(where three very frightened Norwegians jumped into the water from a Swan 44)

an OE32 yacht said: - Thank you, thank you for the offer to rescue us, but we continued sailing ... and reached port

 

Returning to the Bayesian megayacht, which is reminiscent of the HMS Captain, a shipwreck where the Royal Navy is said to have lost more men than in the Battle of Trafalgar (!)

HMS Captain (1869) - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Captain_(1869)

Bayesian in a static calculation could have supported, say, 5 million Newton meters, which is prudent only count with 2/3 (because the overturning is dynamic) ... say 3 million Newton meters

And the force of the wind was perhaps between 6 and 10 million Newton meters

But* ... 1 cubic meter of air weighs 1.2 kilos but 1 cubic meter of water weighs 1000 kilos

And Bayesian was hit by Wind ... and Water in torrents

On top of that, the 70-meter mast was ... on top of a motorboat that was flooding with a list of about 40-45 degrees.



---
*: I can't find a good answer to this question about the dynamic pressure of a torrential rain, anyway the force of the wind is enough of an explanation, plus the huge mast on top of a motorboat

 

1726800117986-png.713115 (1600×676) (sailinganarchy.com)

 

personal-weather-station-dashboard-weather-underground-png.713434 (905×1600) (sailinganarchy.com)

 

The maker of the 56m Bayesian superyacht, which sank last month, denied that it had authorised any writ of summons
EPA
A lawyer for the Italian boatbuilder behind Mike Lynch’s superyacht has filed court papers signalling the company’s intention to sue the crew and the tech tycoon’s widow for damages of up to
£186 million.
The action, lodged in a Sicilian court on Friday, suggests that the sinking of the Bayesian last month may cause reputational damage and loss of earnings to its manufacturer, the Italian Sea Group (TISG), which specialises in building vessels for the rich and famous.
The “disgraceful” move has angered the family of Lynch, 59, who drowned alongside his daughter, Hannah, 18, and five other people. Their bodies have only recently been returned to the UK and a date for the funerals has yet to be set.
Mike and Hannah Lynch were among the seven victims of the tragedy

captain, James Cutfield, from New Zealand, and two other crew members; Camper & Nicholsons, the yacht management company responsible for hiring the crew; and Revtom, the Isle of Man company that owned the Bayesian. Revtom is controlled by Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, 57, who survived the tragedy.

 

James Cutfield, captain of the Bayesian, was said to have been named in court papers
The 56m (183ft) vessel sank in freak weather conditions while anchored off the Sicilian coast in the early hours of August 19. Bacares was injured but managed to swim to safety, along with 14 others.
The cruise was meant to celebrate a major courtroom victory in the US for Lynch, often described as “Britain’s Bill Gates”. He had faced 15 fraud charges that threatened to put him in prison for the rest of his life relating to the $11.7 billion (£8.8 billion) sale of his software company, Autonomy, to US tech giant Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) in 2011.
HPE claimed Lynch had tricked it into paying billions of dollars more than it should have by cooking the books. He was extradited from Britain to San Francisco, where a jury acquitted him on all counts in June.
Within hours of the yachting tragedy — and before all of the bodies were recovered — TISG’s chief executive, Giovanni Costantino, publicly blamed the crew. “Everything that was done reveals a very long summation of errors,” he told the Corriere della Sera newspaper. “The people should not have been in the cabins, the boat should not have been at anchor.” The Bayesian, he added, was “unsinkable”.
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Last night a close friend of the Lynch family said: “The Italian Sea Group should be ashamed. Giovanni Costantino is a disgrace, desperately trying to shift blame. He rushed to the media before all the bodies had even been recovered, showing his lack of decency. Now, it seems, he wants to sue his own clients.”
Giovanni Costantino the CEO of Italian Sea Group

sailorlac · Sep 22, 2024 at 12:34 AM

Giovanni Costantino the CEO of Italian Sea Group
REX
TISG bought the Bayesian’s manufacturer, Perini Navi, out of bankruptcy in 2021. One of its investors is the Giorgio Armani fashion house.
Taking such an aggressive stance when the official police investigation had scarcely begun struck some industry observers as reckless. The Italian authorities launched a manslaughter investigation last month, with Cutfield and at least two crew members under scrutiny. Britain’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch is also investigating why the yacht sank so suddenly. A nearby vessel stayed afloat in the chaos.

 

Boatbuilder ‘seeking £186m from Mike Lynch’s widow and Bayesian crew’ (thetimes.com)

 

Oh boy. Let me try to wrap my head around this. A guy wants to buy a big yacht. The usual manner is to form a corporation to conduct the transaction; one which finds a yacht and brings in the the brokers and surveyors and operations people needed to get the deal done and to start operations. The seller probably had the same set-up. What exactly Perini Navi had to do with this I don't know, but they were probably consulted, and there was likely some sort of ongoing support contract in place.

Now the boat sinks while the owner is hanging out on it at anchor. Lots of horrible press because of the celebrity status of those who died. Everyone in the business sees a massive devaluation of their market. Lots of builders exploit the public's demand for information by posting thinly disguised marketing drivel mostly explaining that their boats won't sink - no really, they won't. Dozens of other boats were sunk or wrecked in the same storm (but I haven't heard of any deaths). We don't know why Bayesian sank beyond the obvious that it filled up with water and sank quickly at night; and some of the guests and one crew didn't make it out.

We do know from analysis that the conditions that would cause that to happen are not really that rare. We also know that the manner of a boat's down flooding is a design choice. Wind is an objective hazard like lightening strikes and earthquakes. Clients and insurers choose the level of risk they are willing to accept and you get on with it. The Yacht codes largely leave this in the hands of the builders and clients.

So the builder sues the third-owner - Really? It may be a ploy to divorce their finances and balance sheets from economic reality. It appears the company is equipped to sink more slowly than its yachts; and I predict all the important people will get out.

 

@CarlosK2

Regarding your question about dynamic pressure of downbursts over water - I have an anecdote. In the 90's, I was working for the USFS doing campground maintenance in Oregon. At the time, there was a total moratorium on timber cutting in the Forest. It was illegal to even possess a chainsaw in the trunk of your car while driving on a highway that passed through USFS land. I was quite literally the only human allowed to carry a chainsaw because I had letters from the USFS HQ saying so, and I was a seasonal employee from back east.

So one night I'm cleaning up in a local pool tournament at about 1 am. and the sheriff comes in looking for me. First question is "do you have your saw?". There were about 100 people trapped in one of the campgrounds due to a downburst, and it took me another 24 hours to cut the roads open and get all the people out. There were quite a few injuries. People were being carried a mile on ambulance gurneys through the debris. A few days later I made it down to the lakeshore near the campground and was just dumbstruck by the damage. The tree-line on one side of the lake had been shoved inland about 150 feet. Nothing had fallen over - it was all still standing in a solid wall for a couple hundred yards down the shore. The trunks had been pulled out and the trees snapped at their base the opposite side to what you would expect - the trunks hinged out of the ground and the trees were sheared off. I'm talking about 150 ft trees with three foot trunks that snapped like matchsticks. The downdraft had collected enough water to flood the shore well inland - it hit more like a tidal wave than anything else. If you've ever seen Viet Nam era footage of 15,000 pound daisy cutters clearing a helo landing area in the jungle - that's what it looked like along the shoreline. The damage inshore was impressive, with debris littering the forest floor to a depth of several feet, but nothing like what happened along the shore.

I never did get any of the $500 bucks in the Calcutta I was five minutes from winning.

 

Arial photo of microburst destruction in La Crosse Wisconsin. Still looking for a photo of one over water. But notice how localized the damage is. They typically affect just a few acres. Now imagine one of these picking up about three feet of water off a lake, rolling it up like a carpet, and throwing it at the tree line.

 

I have not read this article, as I do not have a subscription to The Times, but the Daily Mail has a similar article available online.
Boatbuilder behind Mike Lynch's ill-fated superyacht 'seeking £186million from his widow and crew' over 'reputational damage' | Daily Mail Online https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13879829/Mike-Lynch-Bayesian-186million-widow-crew.html

In this article they say :
---------------------------------
The legal action, filed in a Sicilian court on Friday and first reported by Italian newspaper La Nazione, claims that the sinking caused massive reputational damage and loss of earnings to the Italian Sea Group (IGS), the manufacturer.
While the 'disgraceful' move is said to have angered Lynch's family, IGS said that the lawyer who filed the suit, Tommaso Bertuccelli, was not 'authorised' to do so and has been told to withdraw it immediately.

The company said: 'The Italian Sea Group… strongly denies the claims published in La Nazione regarding a legal action following the Bayesian tragedy. Although TISG has given a generic mandate to the lawyers named in the article, no legal representative of the company has examined, signed or authorised any writ of summons.'
-----------------------------------------
If this is true, then I wonder why this lawyer man Tommaso decided unilaterally to issue a summons without being instructed to so by his client?
I suspect that Giovanni Costantino probably decided to throw the lawyer man under the proverbial bus as well when he saw the (predictable) reactions....
The sheer arrogance and audacity of Costantino from day 1 of this sad saga is quite mind blowing.

 

Ninety years ago, Howard L Chapelle wrote his seminal work 'The History of American Sailing Ships'. In that work, the very first paragraph, of the very first chapter has remained my touchstone ever since I first read it....

From a loss perspective, this incident sits right up there with the burning of the M/V CONCEPTION...crew escapes, passengers don't.

 

at 1640

The $360 Million Star of the Show! | Monaco Yacht Show 2024! (youtube.com)