British investigators likely to contact designer of Mike Lynch’s superyacht

Investigation will also involve ‘on-site evidence collection’ including seeing what the wreck looks like and gathering electronic data

The designer of Mike Lynch’s superyacht Bayesian is likely to be contacted by British investigators.
The vessel was designed by Ron Holland, a naval architect, who now lives in Vancouver.
Gavin Pritchard, a retired Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) inspector, told The Telegraph that Mr Holland would, in the normal way, be contacted by the MAIB as its investigation into the sinking gathers pace.
Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily in the small hours of Monday morning with 22 people aboard including its owner, Mr Lynch, the millionaire tech entrepreneur.
Mr Pritchard, a Royal Navy officer who was a principal marine accident investigator, said the priority of the MAIB would be to secure “perishable evidence”.
He said: “They’ll be wanting to interview survivors, get some electronic data, which would be things like radar tracks of the vessel or voice recordings of radio calls.”
Bayesian sank while on a celebration cruise organised by Mr Lynch.
He had organised the trip to mark the end of more than a decade of legal wranglings over his 2011 sale of Autonomy, the British tech company, to Hewlett Packard for $11 billion.
MAIB investigators would be working closely with their Italian counterparts to find out why the yacht sank, Mr Pritchard said.
“Right now it’s on-site evidence collection. They want to see what the wreck looks like, and they’ll want to interview the people who were on board.
“That’s why the MAIB will want to look at the vessel using either [a remotely operated vehicle] or divers, or will want to have a look and see what the positions of watertight doors, hatches and windows were.
“It’d be important to state that [the MAIB] doesn’t attribute blame,” added Mr Pritchard, who ran one of the branch’s four investigative teams before his 2022 retirement.
“One of the first questions that accident investigators ask is ‘has anything like this ever happened before?’ And I have to say, having observed this tragic event, I honestly can’t think of anything similar to this.”
He said that the key question for the MAIB would be finding out why Bayesian sank as quickly as it did – reportedly within 60 seconds of a tornado or waterspout passing over the yacht.
“That’s the question that the investigators will have to answer: Why did it sink so quickly? That’s the key one, in my mind, for two reasons,” said Mr Pritchard.
“First is that that is a lesson that will be more widely applicable to lots of other ships – ships should not sink quickly.
“And the second point is that all vessels, from even small boats right up to supertankers, are all equipped with watertight doors [and] watertight windows, and they’re designed to withstand the risk of flooding, whether that’s flooding coming into the hull or down-flooding with water that gets on top of boats.”
Italian investigators are examining the wreck, which currently lies in about 50 metres of water just off Porticello harbour in northern Sicily, to see if any portholes or windows were open.
Air temperatures at Palermo airport, some 12 miles west of the sinking site, were reported as around 27-28C until the hour that a storm passed through the area at about 5am local time on Monday.
Mr Pritchard said that focusing on the cause of the sinking, including any role played by the Bayesian’s mast – at 237ft-high, the second tallest aluminium mast in the world – would help the MAIB identify lessons for the wider maritime world about safety aboard sailing yachts.
“I don’t think it would be completely wrong at this stage to say because it had the most enormous mast – second biggest mast in the world – it’s vulnerable to being blown over because it’s [been caught in] an extreme meteorological event,” said the retired investigator.
Referring to the 16-year-old yacht’s age and seeming lack of involvement in any previously reported safety incidents, he added: “The design of that boat will have been perfectly safe. It’s been checked and double-checked. And there’s all sorts of audits and checks that are done on these vessels. So it’s, you know, it’d be wrong to speculate that somehow the design of the vessel was unsafe.
“I’d say it’s vulnerable, because somehow the water’s got in and it should have had watertight doors shut.”
Mr Holland could not immediately be contacted for comment.