Canadian killed when yacht sank off Sicilian coast was the cook aboard the U.K.-flagged vessel | CBC News

A Canadian man has died after a luxury yacht was struck by an unexpectedly violent storm and sank off the coast of Sicily early on Monday, local officials said.

The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-metre-long sailboat, was carrying 22 people and was anchored just off shore near the port of Porticello when it was hit by ferocious weather, the Italian coast guard said in a statement.

Eyewitnesses said the yacht vanished quickly beneath the waves shortly before dawn. Fifteen people escaped before it went down, including a one-year-old girl.

The Palermo Port Authority said officials later recovered the body of Thomas Recaldo, a Canadian-born man who had been living in Antigua. The authority told CBC News he had been the ship’s onboard cook.

Six other people were missing after the sinking, including British tech magnate Mike Lynch.

The Italian coast guard said the missing had British, American and Canadian nationalities.

‘The ship behind us was gone’

“The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude,” a coast guard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo told Reuters.

Eight of the 15 people rescued were transferred to local hospitals. All were in a stable condition, local media reported.

The captain of a nearby boat told Reuters that when the storm hit, he turned the engine on to keep control of the vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian.

“We managed to keep the ship in position, and after the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone,” Karsten Borner told journalists.

He said that his crew then found some of the survivors on a life raft, including three who were seriously injured, and took them on board before the coast guard picked them up.

British tech leader Lynch missing

The Bayesian was built by Italian shipbuilder Perini in 2008.

The luxury ship has an aluminum hull and can carry 12 guests and a crew of up to 10, according to online specialist yacht sites.

One of the survivors, identified as Charlotte Emsley, said she had momentarily lost hold of her one-year-old daughter, Sofia, in the water, but then managed to hold her up over the waves until a lifeboat inflated and they were both pulled to safety, Italian news agency ANSA reported, quoting the mother. The father, James Emsley, also survived, said Salvo Cocina of Sicily’s civil protection agency

Cocina said the vessel belonged to British tech magnate Mike Lynch, who is among the missing. Angela Bacares, Lynch’s wife, was among those rescued, though it wasn’t immediately clear if she required hospital treatment.

Lynch, 59, is one of Britain’s best-known tech entrepreneurs. He built the country’s largest software firm, Autonomy, from his groundbreaking research at Cambridge University. He sold the firm to HP in a multibillion-dollar deal in 2011, before the transaction unravelled spectacularly following the acquisition, with the U.S. tech giant accusing him of fraud.

Lynch spent much of the last decade in court defending his name. He was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June, after he spent more than a year living effectively under house arrest.

Lynch’s PhD thesis and the software that made his fortune was based on Bayesian mathematical theory.

Heavy rains in recent days

The boat left the Sicilian port of Milazzo on Aug. 14 and was last tracked east of Palermo on Sunday evening, with a navigation status of “at anchor,” according to vessel tracking app Vesselfinder.

A U.K. foreign ministry spokesperson said British officials were in contact with local authorities over the incident and were ready to provide consular support for Britons who were affected.

Storms and heavy rainfall have swept down Italy in recent days — with floods and landslides causing major damage in the north of the country — after weeks of scorching heat.

The coast guard said the boat had been found at a depth of 49 metres and that divers were inspecting the wreck. Prosecutors in the nearby town of Termini Imerese have opened an investigation to look into what had gone wrong.