Until midnight last Sunday, Matteo Cannia was sitting out on a bench overlooking the sea in Porticello. It was too hot to sleep.
The 78-year-old, a fisherman since the age of 10, saw the first flashes of lightning. “I heard the thunder and the wind and decided to go home,” he told me.
“As the storm grew, everyone woke. Water was coming into my friend’s house.”
At about 04:15 local time, Fabio Cefalù – a fisherman who had been due to go out that wild Monday morning but, like others, decided against it – suddenly saw a flare go up.
He changed his mind and went out to sea to find out what was going on – and discovered only cushions and floating planks of wood.
A luxury super yacht called the Bayesian, moored only a few hundred metres away, had already sunk.
It all happened in a 16-minute window of disaster, chaos and torment, which catapulted a sleepy Sicilian fishing port to the centre of world news.
All but seven of the 22 passengers of the Bayesian had scrambled into a life raft as the yacht began to capsize. The others never made it out.
Charlotte Golunski, a British woman, was thrown into the water with her one-year-old daughter, Sophie. She told of clutching her baby in the air with all her strength to keep her from drowning. “It was all black around me,” she said, “and the only thing I could hear were the screams of others.”
She, her baby, and her husband James were among those rescued by a nearby sailing boat captain. Trapped inside the sinking Bayesian was her colleague Mike Lynch – one of the UK’s top tech entrepreneurs, dubbed “Britain’s Bill Gates”.
