£13m operation to boost tragic yacht from seabed defined – it’d want 40 divers

A whopping £12.7 million would be required to recover the Bayesian super yacht from the Sicilian seabed.

The vessel tragically sunk in the early hours of Monday August 19, after the anchor gave way during a freak tornado, known as a waterspout, tore the ship over and down the choppy waters.

15 people were rescued, with six people waiting to be recovered. The last of the bodies, including tech giant Mike Lynch, who owned the boat, and his daughter Hannah, were recovered on Saturday.

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The rescue mission is completed, but questions on what to do with the huge wreck still remain. While some people are in favour of retrieving it, others are worried about the huge mission and the eye-watering costs.

Salvage engineer Nick Sloane gave an insight on what would need to be done and he warned it’s a mammoth task which could take six-to-eight weeks. The South African led the operation to recover the Costa Concordia cruise ship off the Tuscany coast in 2012.

“I would say it would cost up to €15million but possibly you could do it for a bit less,” Sloane told La Repubblica newspaper. “The recovery operation would take six to eight weeks. It could be completed before the second half of October.”

Although he is known to be experienced in these types of missions, Sloane emphasised he had not been approached for this particular instance. Recovering the ship could help investigations of manslaughter that are currently being explored following the wreck. Experts could discover how the large vessel sunk just minutes after being struck by the waterspout.

To complete the operation, a huge platform would first have to be constructed, which would then be towed out to sea and left above the underwater ship wreck. Around 40 highly skilled divers would then have to go under to find the yacht.

Then, the ship’s aluminium mast would need to be cut off under water before the rest of the vessel was dragged to the surface. The mast was the tallest of the kind when the boat was first constructed and would prove a huge task.

Huge cranes would be put on the floating surface before they were attached to the wreck under water. Operators then lift the boat up extremely slowly, or the boat could break under the pressure of the water.

“This is the most delicate part of the operation and needs to be done very, very slowly, because the Bayesian is full of water. The important thing is that when the yacht reaches the surface, the sea must be calm. So they’ll have to carefully check the weather forecasts. The yacht should be recovered exactly as it is, in one piece, with the aim of maintaining it as intact as possible,” Sloane explained.

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