But within minutes, the lights would be gone after a weather bomb forced the yacht to suddenly keel over 90 degrees to starboard (right-hand side). It was a capsize from which there was no return.
Almost immediately, tonnes of water gushed inside, trapping guests in their cabins below and setting off a frantic rescue effort, co-ordinated by the yacht’s New Zealand skipper, James Cutfield, 53, with the help of crew and other survivors, including a London-based Kiwi lawyer, Ayla Ronald, 38, and her partner Matthew Fletcher, 43.
From the time Cutfield, the skipper, was woken by a deckhand at the height of the storm to the time the Bayesian capsized, just seven minutes passed. In the 15 seconds it took for the yacht to capsize, no one had time to find life jackets.
Trapped in cabins below were the yacht’s owner, UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, and four guests. Before dawn broke they would be entombed 50m below in the sunken yacht. The body of the seventh victim, the yacht’s chef, Recaldo Thomas, 59, was found later that day floating near the wreck site.
Two years later, the tragedy and mystery of the Bayesian won’t release its hold.
Three of the crew are under investigation by Italian authorities for multiple manslaughter and culpable shipwreck: Cutfield, from Auckland’s North Shore; deckhand Matthew Griffiths, 24; and the ship’s chief engineer, Tim Parker-Eaton, 58, both from the UK.
No charges have been laid and may never be, depending on the outcome of ongoing investigations by both Italian authorities and the UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB).
Complicating matters is an $898 million civil claim filed in January this year by The Italian Sea Group (TISG) against the three crew members and the Bayesian’s owner, Revtom Ltd, a company controlled by Lynch’s widow, Angela Bacares. TISG owns Perini Navi, the Italian shipyard that built the Bayesian.
As a result, a cone of silence surrounds the tragedy. Repeated attempts to contact the survivors and others connected to the Bayesian, including the yacht’s renowned designer, Ron Holland, have been unsuccessful. A spokesman for the Lynch family declined to comment.
Ayla Ronald’s father, Lin Ronald, an experienced yachtie, said his daughter had spent hours sailing when she was young and was brought up on a boat. He told the Herald the Bayesian was not an easy subject for her to discuss and she was unlikely to speak about the tragedy.
“There are all sorts of complications and complexities involved,” he said.
The Herald has pieced together the extraordinary survival story using the MAIB interim investigation report, examining the three-levelled layout of the yacht, and media reports from the time of its sinking.
A celebratory cruise
August 18, 2024, was the last night of a celebratory cruise along the Italian coastline to celebrate Lynch’s acquittal on criminal charges relating to the $19 billion sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011.
HP had accused Lynch and Autonomy’s chief financial officer of inflating the firm’s value before the takeover and sued for $7.6b in damages – a case that dragged on for nearly 13 years in the United States.
On board the Bayesian were family, friends and members of Lynch’s defence team from London law firm Clifford Chance, including Ronald, who grew up in Christchurch and gained her law degree at the University of Otago.
Here’s what happened in the early hours of August 19, based on the MAIB investigation report.
3am
Deckhand Matthew Griffiths is on night watch; the breeze is light, around 8 knots. The yacht’s retractable keel, capable of extending to 10m under sail, is raised to 4m. In the distance, Griffiths can see flashes of lightning and thunderclouds.
3.30am
Ayla Ronald and Matthew Fletcher wake from the sound of the storm but stay in their cabin on the starboard side of the Bayesian.
3.55am
Griffiths videos the approaching storm and posts on social media before shutting the yacht’s hatches and saloon windows as rain squalls approach.
3.57am
The Bayesian’s anchor starts to drag as the wind increases to 30 knots. The yacht starts to list to starboard.
3.59am
Griffiths runs below to wake Cutfield, telling him the storm is worsening and the anchor is dragging. Other crew members wake and come on deck, including the chief officer Tijs Koopmans, 36, who has sensed the change in the yacht’s movement.
4am
Woken by the storm, chief engineer Parker-Eaton heads to the engine control room, checking the generators are running before going upstairs to the wheelhouse to start the steering and hydraulic pumps controlling the propellers.
Cutfield instructs Koopmans, his chief officer, to wake the rest of the crew in their forward cabins. Down below, chef Thomas is busy stowing cutlery and pans in the yacht’s galley, and shouts “Good morning” to Koopmans and nearby crew as they pass. That will be the last time they see him alive.
4.02am
A CCTV camera on shore captures flashes of lightning, wind and torrential rain so strong the view from the camera lens is obliterated. One video shows the Bayesian’s lit-up mast in the distance beginning to tip to the right.
Angela Bacares leaves the owner’s cabin and goes upstairs to the saloon and wheelhouse area to check on what’s happening. Two other guests, Charlotte Golunski, 37, a partner in Lynch’s venture capital firm Invoke Capital, and her partner, James Emsley, 38, are woken by the Bayesian’s list. They leave their cabin and head upstairs to the saloon, carrying their 1-year-old daughter, Sofia.
The crew are hurriedly securing loose items in the yacht and on deck. Upstairs on the yacht’s flying bridge, the canvas canopy above Cutfield rips from end to end as the wind increases.
Koopmans checks with the chief engineer in the wheelhouse that the Bayesian is ready to manoeuvre and shouts up to Cutfield on the flying bridge.
‘We didn’t see it coming’
4.06am
The wind suddenly increases to 70 knots (130 km/h) with even stronger gusts. The force on the Bayesian’s huge mast, boom, rigging and furled sails is enough to make the superyacht violently capsize.
From that moment on, everyone fights for their lives as seawater gushes down the staircases.
Cutfield would later say, “We didn’t see it coming.”
On the flying bridge, he and two crew members are thrown sideways and hit by flying items, injuring all three. In the saloon and wheelhouse below, James Emsley suffers a gash to his arm and Bacares, too, is injured, including deep cuts to her bare feet from broken glass.
Deckhand Griffiths is hurled from the flying bridge into the sea. He later tells Italian news agency Ansa that after he got back on the yacht, he and the crew tried to rescue everyone they could.
“We were walking on the walls [of the yacht],” he said.
Chief officer Koopmans finds Bacares in the saloon and pushes her up through cascading water to Cutfield on the flying bridge. He and Cutfield help Golunski, Emsley and baby Sofia out of the flooding saloon through the same route.
Below, Ronald and Fletcher struggle to escape from their starboard cabin, the door of which is now on the ceiling. Drawers have come loose from a cabinet and crashed down. The couple use them to form a makeshift ladder, climbing up to the door, along the internal walls of the yacht’s central alleyway and up stairs into the wheelhouse.
Seeing Ronald and Fletcher in the wheelhouse below, Griffiths and another crew member climb down from the flying bridge to help them escape the rising water, lifting them up with the help of Koopmans, and Cutfield above.
With the Bayesian sinking and the wheelhouse filling with water, Griffiths and two crew members find themselves trapped in an air pocket by a jammed door on the port (left) side. Emsley, bleeding heavily from a gashed arm, helps open the door from the outside so they can escape.
The force of the water sweeps Koopmans to the back of the flooded saloon, trapping him in an air pocket. He dives down and opens sliding doors at the rear, and swims clear of the sinking vessel.
With the flying bridge soon to be underwater, Cutfield instructs those gathered to jump into the sea, telling them to swim clear of the mast and boom into the dark.
In the chaos that follows, Golunski loses hold of baby Sofia for a couple of seconds in the rough seas before managing to grab hold of her again.
“I held her afloat with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning. It was all dark … I screamed for help, but all I could hear around me was the screams of others,” Golunski said at the time.
4.22am
Chief engineer Parker-Eaton is sitting on the Bayesian’s hull, holding the EPIRB (emergency position indicating radio beacon), which he grabbed when the superyacht capsized. On hearing Cutfield’s shouts, he swims towards the group of survivors. There are 15 left of the original 22 on board, struggling to stay afloat in the stormy sea.
Some are treading water, others holding on to cushions to keep them afloat. Griffiths fashions a tourniquet for Emsley’s gashed arm.
Ronald and Fletcher help locate a floating cushion to support the baby and use the torch of an iPhone to search for other survivors in the darkness. There are none.
Cutfield and a crew member swim back to the Bayesian and try unsuccessfully to release a liferaft from the rear of the yacht. Koopmans swims to the bow and manages to release a second liferaft, towing it back to the group.
4.24am
The liferaft is inflated, and the crew help the other survivors to cram inside. All are cold and shocked, some bleeding from injuries. In the distance, the bow of the Bayesian rises up and then disappears beneath the surface, taking those still trapped to the seabed 50m below.
In the liferaft, the crew treat the injured while others search for flares. Cutfield and another crew member paddle the raft towards the 42m Sir Robert Baden Powell, the only other vessel anchored in the bay, shouting for help. Parker-Eaton used the liferaft’s torch to try to signal cars and a hotel on the cliff above.
The Baden Powell had also started to drag its anchor shortly before 4am, causing the ketch’s skipper, Karsten Börner, 73, to start the engine to avoid hitting the Bayesian anchored nearby. It took 11 minutes of manoeuvring before his vessel stopped dragging.
Guests on board thought they saw a whale when a lightning strike lit up the sea. It was the hull of the sinking Bayesian.
The sudden weather front, dubbed a “black swan” event, passed as quickly as it had arrived. When Börner looked back to where the lights of the Bayesian’s mast and spreaders should be, they had gone. He assumed the superyacht had headed out to sea to escape the storm.
4.34am
A red parachute flare is fired from the Bayesian’s liferaft but goes unnoticed.
4.43am
A second flare is seen by Börner’s crew. They launch a boat and transport the 15 survivors to the Baden Powell. The crew bandage wounds and distribute blankets to the distressed survivors.
4.53am
The Baden Powell crew return several times with senior Bayesian crew, including Cutfield, to search in the darkness for anyone else who might have survived.
At dawn the Italian Coastguard arrives to transfer the injured to waiting ambulances. A distraught Bacares, who needs treatment for her injuries, does not want to leave while her husband and daughter are still missing.
Dark and dangerous work
It would take five days for a team of specialist divers to painstakingly retrieve the six bodies from the wreck of the Bayesian. The 50m depth meant divers could only work on the site for around 10 minutes. The yacht’s narrow passageways and rooms – blocked by furniture, cushions and mattresses – made access difficult and dangerous.
One by one, the bodies of Lynch, his friends Jonathan Bloomer, 70, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Judy, 71; and Christopher Morvillo, 59, one of Lynch’s lawyers at Clifford Chance, and his wife Neda, 57, were brought to the surface. Hannah was the last to be found.
Nearly a year later, the Bayesian would claim another victim after a 39-year-old Dutch diver died while cutting the yacht’s boom away during the salvage operation in May 2025.
The following month, the wreck of the Bayesian, encrusted with marine growth, was raised from the seabed, an event that was livestreamed in Italy.
The curse of the Bayesian
Two years after the yacht sank, the curse of the Bayesian lingers.
Cutfield, who is based in Palma on the Spanish island of Mallorca, and the two other crew members still have the criminal investigation hanging over them.
Cutfield has been involved with boats his whole life, racing Olympic-class 470 dinghies in his younger years and later working in the boat-building industry for 30 years before becoming a captain. His brother Mark described Cutfield as a top sailor who had been a “well-respected” superyacht captain for the past eight years.
Bacares and Lynch’s estate faces a long battle over the TISG lawsuit, which alleges crew failures and operational negligence led to the sinking of the Bayesian, not design flaws.
It argues that Revtom, as the owner company, is liable for the actions of the crew. TISG claims it has suffered reputational damage, ruinous losses, a collapse in share price and sales that have slumped to zero.
(TISG’s shares plummeted again this year after it revealed debt-related financial losses and sought court protection from creditors.)
However a UK study, commissioned by the MAIB after the sinking, pointed out that neither the Bayesian’s owner nor crew would have known about the superyacht’s stability issues when it was in “motoring mode” (with the keel raised, sails furled and a light load of consumables aboard) because the vulnerability was not identified in the yacht’s stability information book (SIB) carried on board.
The study by the University of Southampton’s Wolfson Unit for Marine Technology and Industrial Aerodynamics, which used a model to replicate the Bayesian’s motoring mode, concluded in 2025 that in wind speeds of more than 63.5 knots the Bayesian was more than likely to capsize.
Once the yacht tipped by more than 70 degrees, there was no chance of it righting itself, the Wolfson study said. Around half of the heeling load was attributed to the yacht’s mast.
In October 2024, the New York Times published a story in which naval architects and marine industry experts blamed the Bayesian’s instability on its very tall mast, claiming it significantly raised the centre of gravity, making it vulnerable to capsize in severe weather. TISG refuted the story and announced it would take legal action.
But the news organisation is not backing down. The story is still on its website and the New York Times’ senior vice-president of communications, Danielle Rhoades Ha, told the Herald, “We’re confident in the accuracy of our coverage. There has been no lawsuit related to our article.”
Best sailing yacht
The Bayesian, designed by Holland Design and built by Perini Navi in 2008, was originally named Salute. That year, the yacht won best interior at the International Superyacht Society Awards, and the following year won best sailing yacht over 45m at the World Superyacht Awards.
Lynch and Bacares bought the yacht in 2014, renaming it the Bayesian and carrying out refits in 2016 and 2020.
Ron Holland, 79 and based in Vancouver, Canada, has designed superyachts for the wealthy, including Duran Duran, and comes with a remarkable pedigree. He designed the maxi class Condor and Peter Blake’s Whitbread Around the World Race yacht, Lion New Zealand.
Perini Navi built 10 superyachts using the Holland 56m hull, but the Bayesian was the only sloop (with a single mast). The other yachts were ketches with shorter masts.
Holland, who published his memoir All the Oceans: Designing by the Seat of my Pants in 2018, also designed the Mirabella V, now called M5, in 2003, the largest single-masted sailing yacht in the world, featuring an 88.5m mast. He did not reply to messages from the Herald.
Jane Phare is a senior journalist based in Auckland. Her roles at the Herald have included assistant editor of NZ Herald, editor of the Weekend Herald, founding editor of Viva, features editor and deputy print editor.
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