FROM J C

This could be the wildest weird weather story yet. Yesterday, AP ran a mysterious, submersive story headlined, “Search continues for British tech magnate and 5 others after luxury superyacht sinks off Sicily.”

The Bayesian was a $30 million, 184-foot superyacht owned by Mike Lynch, often described as “the British Bill Gates.” In 2011, Lynch sold his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion. The Bayesian spared no expense, offering guests comfort and performance, opulent staterooms, sophisticated social spaces, and cutting-edge technology, all powered by robust engines for long-distance cruising.

Yesterday, according to survivors and passengers on a nearby yacht, just after 4am local time, with the Bayesian quietly moored off Palermo, Sicily, it suddenly and unexpectedly sank. They don’t know why.

A wild thunderstorm hit Palermo around the same time, so the going theory is a freak waterspout appeared out of nowhere and swamped the massive ship. Just like that. A yacht moored nearby was unaffected, and helped with rescuing the 15 survivors taking an unanticipated night swim in the Mediterranean Sea.

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Six people, including Lynch, 59, and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, didn’t make it. They’ve only recovered one body so far.

Marco Tilotta, a specialist diver from Palermo’s fire and rescue service, told Italian newspaper Il Messaggero that the superyacht was “practically intact” on the seabed, 48 meters below the surface. “It is resting on its starboard side. It has no gashes, no signs of impact,” he reported.

I did a little digging and found nothing comparable to this story. In 2015, another superyacht, the M.Y. Yogi, sank in the Aegean, but it was at sea amidst a terrible storm and took hours to sink. Before this, superyachters never needed to worry about freak waterspouts striking in the middle of the night while they were sleeping and minding their own business.

Fueling online conspiracy theories, Lynn’s cruise was meant to celebrate winning his criminal fraud trial. In June, a San Fransisco jury found Lynch not guilty of inflating his company’s value when he sold it to HP back in 2011. But in even more news of the weird, Lynn’s co-defendant, Autonomy’s former vice-president, also died mysteriously, two days earlier on Saturday morning. A still-unidentified driver ran him over while he was minding his own business jogging in England.

I don’t know what the odds are, but it is queer. Ironically, the Bayesian Theory, after which the yacht was presumably named, is a famous statistical device for calculating the probability of very improbable events. Despite the yacht’s advanced technology and safety features, it apparently fell victim to an extremely improbable weather event, and even more implausibly wasn’t even damaged. Weird.

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OK…NOW DO THE AMERICAN ONE