Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms Mike Lynch, often dubbed the UK's answer to Bill Gates, is missing after his luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily this morning. Lynch founded Autonomy, which Hewlett-Packard bought for $11 billion in 2011. Multiple reports say the British entrepreneur cannot be found after the tycoon's Bayesian, a 56-metre superyacht, …
This post has been deleted by its author
Very sad for all concerned, joking aside. People often (wrongly) assume the Med is a tranquil body of water.
Yep, sad if true. Acquited in June, probably relaxing after years of litigation and maybe now gone. Also agree about the weather. I've been sailing around there and the weather around Sicily and Italy can get brutal. Investigation will show what happened, so if anyone was on anchor or weather watch and why the Captain didn't try to head for shelter given they weren't far from a harbour.
The tenor of quotes I've seen elsewhere from the locals is that it really seems to have been a complete freak event, even for that neck of the woods. Nobody seems to be decrying the fact the boat didn't take shelter - it just got nailed by a waterspout.
> "The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude," a coast guard official in Palermo said.
The tenor of quotes I've seen elsewhere from the locals is that it really seems to have been a complete freak event, even for that neck of the woods. Nobody seems to be decrying the fact the boat didn't take shelter - it just got nailed by a waterspout.
Yep, this video on the event-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY7TGND4H-g
has some CCTV from onshore in Palermo showing it got very windy very suddenly. Some of the comments also speculate that Bayesian had a lifting keel that may have contributed, but sounds like it got knocked down, possibly flooded and then sank quickly.
Capsizing a yacht usually takes a big wave: wavelength of twice the beam (hull width) and amplitude greater than the beam is usually what does it. Since the Bayesian had a beam of 11.5m, that would mean a wave of around 33m wavelength and 11+ m height. Big, but certainly not impossible, particularly if it was piling up and breaking on a lee shore.
> Well it had never sunk before, so the prior probability of sinking now was low
Did the front fall off?
The Med certainly is NOT a tranquil body of water. And this was kind of a freak storm, a very localized hurricane/tornado that struck right where that ship was and with it's huge mast, those hurricane force winds apparently just pushed the boat over to capsize and sink rather quickly.
There was nothing that any forecasting could have done...
This post has been deleted by its author
Oh Dear, I am forced to 'explain' the comment !!! :(
Yes, it was a reference to HP's loss in the US of A courts.
Yes, it was an allusion to HP's lack of grace and general unhappiness with the result in the courts.
Yes, it was also an allusion to the 'obvious',in the interwebs darkest corners, resulting reaction by HP.
Yes, it implies conspiracy ... which the internet *always* goes to, much like the 'Godwin's law' equation tends towards 1.
Yes, it was a joke re: both conspiracy and 'Bad Taste'.
Bad taste humour is extremely common as a reaction to something 'Bad' ... particularly common in the UK including historically, no-one is immune !!!
I actually posted that IMHO Mike Lynch was innocent and had done his best for Autonomy, as was his job.
See https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/06/06/mike_lynch_cleared/#c_4875151
P.S. Thanks for the 'Doorknob' sobriquet, much more pleasent than names I was called in darker times :)
P.P.S. Yes ... it is a very bad situation *but* my condolences mean little !!!
:)
What a complete Bourke, what if a conspiracy theory is true?
Particualry when it involves the US state/entity. Not a massive leap given the close proximatey to the death of his co-defendent.
Could be just coicindence of course.
You probably believe Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK. Or that Covid 19 came from "zoonotic transfer".
Well, Orcas are known to hunt by spiraling around their prey to herd them into position... Some really energetic jumps to stir the winds, perhaps?
Or cooperation by water nymphs...
Or, having exhausted good fortune, was only left with the other kind and made the mistake of going to sea.
Naw, the Russians have only been sending things to Ukraine that sort of, or kind of work. Anything somewhat functional and fit for purpose is entirely omitted from the theater.
Seriously though, I'd be entirely unsurprised to see some excess inventory from WWII rust its way into Ukraine soon.
The V-22 Osprey has around 6000 shaft horsepower and some spare change.
Having been around them a fair bit, including witnessing the class' first horizontal flight that was entirely absent VIP's, suffice it to say that it cannot be mistaken for a waterspout.
Face that his co-defendent also happen to die this week as well, does raise my suspicions. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/19/mike-lynchs-co-defendant-in-us-trial-fatally-struck-by-car-while-jogging#:~:text=Stephen%20Chamberlain%2C%20once%20Mike%20Lynch's,Cambridgeshire%2C%20his%20lawyer%20has%20said.
For some reason, the Beatles song Maxwell's Silver Hammer comes to mind...
What are the odds that both Robert Maxwell and Mike Lynch both disappear off yachts? But the odd thing is that Lynch seemed to have won, so did someone drop Maxwell's hammer on him, and if so why?
I'd better go get my tinfoil hat ready...
Well one "fell" off a boat in calm seas just before pension fraud charges that would almost certainly see him jailed and the other disappeared after the boat being hit by a tornado with 12 others after being cleared in the US courts
So exactly the same really.....
Look this was a tragedy that affected him and 11 other people. The sea is a cruel mistress and while incredibly rare, things like this happen. It should be remembered however that there are a lot of people who are mourning today, so let's tone down the conspiracy crap
I'm not sure you can say what they were doing was particularly dangerous, at 5am they were almost certainly anchored. Waterspouts and Katabatic gusts (look 'em up) are two ways you can die at sea even when sitting still in a sound boat. More bad luck than dangerous behaviour.
I remember gazing vaguely out the window over breakfast back when I lived on Neutral Bay in Sydney, calm bright day and a lovely new large yacht (15-20 metres) sailing very very slowly in the tiny early morning breeze, crept very very slowly into the sub base's inlet in front of me then wore about for a down-harbour reach. Doing perhaps quarter of a mile per hour, if that. Lovely sleepy but active scene as I sipped my tea. BANG it was horizontal, maybe 30-40+metres of mast and full sails flat on the water and maybe 10-20 ton keel horizontal above the water on the right. 90⁰ rotation ~instantly (less than half a second).
Then stayed like that.
5-10 seconds later, abruptly righted by the keel suddenly falling back into the water and a great pseudo-sucking sound of the sails being pulled off the water.
And that's in the heart of one of the safest harbours on the planet. With almost no wind.
?
Gust...
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/08/19/mike_lynch_missing_yacht/#c_4915067
Add: particularly on the north side, Sydney Harbour is characterised by high land dropping sharply to the water.
Yeah. Lots of places have localized windbursts quite often. Here at MF2 (and previously at MF1) it's quite common to have little or no wind where I'm standing while the treetops a few hundred feet away wave about wildly, or vice versa. We also get a lot of dust devils and the occasional tornado, again often visible while there's no perceptible wind where I am.
"Anchoring in 50m? I doubt it."
Yeah, beyond unlikely.
Although, a sea anchor might've been in order and alas, with a sudden blow, unlikely to have been able to be deployed in time. Many think of waterspouts under the standard of tame Floridian waterspouts, watching recreational craft blow through them, but some can be nearly as fierce as a land based tornado.
And boats around as robust in the end as a house trailer.
I'm quite a strong swimmer, infamous for treading water recreationally for an entire afternoon and those kind of conditions would make me quail.
Some very odd comments here.
I’ve anchored in close to 40m in the Med, and that’s on a 45’ Yacht, about 15m. The islands often drop very quickly to deep water. With a 50m yacht they will be even further from the shore, and often - there would be a very few harbours that could accommodate a boat of that size.
Also, to follow myself up because it may not be obvious to some - the boat sank in 49m of water, but it's quite possible the anchor depth is less than that. Boats do not sit over their anchor, they drop it then drift back as the anchor has to lie horizontally on the ground to hold - there's necessarily a good length of chain on the bottom before the anchor curves up to the boat. If they dropped in 30-40m there's probably at least 120m of chain out, and the boat has sunk at least 40m from it's anchor point. In a sheltered anchorage the wind is usually blowing away from the land, so it's proabbly in deeper water.
>"Anchoring in 50m? I doubt it."
>Yeah, beyond unlikely.
"Cable" is a standard Imperial measure of length because it was the standard length of the standard British anchor cable, for hundreds of years, for wooden ships, sloops, etc of typically half this boat's size.
It is nearly 4x times longer than these declarations of "I doubt it" and "beyond unlikely".
I suppose a nameless tech company have enough resources and private security to arrange a disappearance...
Given we all have more than an inkling to which party this refers, I find it incredible that for the first time in a couple of decades this "nameless" firm hadn't screwed it up.
So on the balance of probabilities (you can use Baysian inference if you wish) I would bet the farm on a cockup against some insane conspiracy.
"I suppose a nameless tech company have enough resources and private security to arrange a disappearance..."
And fake multiple nation's weather service records, as well as radar and satellite photo and radar imagery. Yep, must be the company owned by the space aliens at it again.
Damned Vogons!
I was disappointed to see no conspiracy theories regarding this incident involving a certain global hardware company and the missing gentleman, but suspect the first post (of which there is only the evidence of deletion) may have contained some speculation.
On a different note, my thoughts are with his family.
The conspiracy theorists to appear not to have received the memo that he was found innocent of all charges, and are going for the faked death angle.
Obviously this is complete nonsense. You can check my posting history, I've always said he was innocent, even before the trial.
"The conspiracy theorists to appear not to have received the memo that he was found innocent of all charges,"
I think you got the wrong end of the conspiracy stick! The conspiracy theory is that some large tech company that lost a recent fraud case might have been out for revenge ;-)
I'll pull you up on this:
>he was found innocent of all charges
He was as guilty as hell of everything he was accused of. I worked for years at that level; didn't know Lynch or Autonomy from a bar of soap before he exploded into the press; but recognised immediately his language & tactics. If you've seen enough parasites in action up close & personal: absolutely standard tactics: effectively shouting his guilt. So I dug out some of the analyst reports. Yeah, guilty as hell. He'd used the standard semi-illegality most software companies use for revenue recognition, but instead of staying carefully inside the arguable grey area, he'd gone absolutely psycho. Like, loonytoons OTT. (Implying complicit auditors)
Now, come the court case, I could see where that actually worked in his favour.
See, if *I* could see that in a coupla minutes looking at public information, there's absolutely 0 excuse for HP's full-time M&A boys sitting in the dataroom (with full behind-the-curtain access) not spotting it. No way. No way in hell. Barring a level of incompetence/arrogance/irresponsibility that blisters the eyes even to think about.
So I can see a judgement of Not Guilty on the basis of : "Dear Mr & Mrs HP. Grow the hell up. You're responsible for your own actions. Despite what your mummy tells you. Blind Freddy could see these numbers were fraud. Caveat emptor. Dismissed."
Essentially, the extraordinary degree & obviousness of the fraud protected him legally. HP can not announce in court that they demand protection from their actions whilst also struggling and crying and scweaming for mummy if they try to wear shoes with shoelaces.
This is not the same as Lynch being innocent.
The story out of Palo Alto at the time is that every single person involved with the due diligence process in HP saw right through Lynch's revenue kiting operation. Autonomy was just Softkey / Mattel on a much bigger scale. Although in the case of Mattel their due diligence was a joke. There is a very good reason why when Autonomy was shopped around everyone just laughed in their faces. The numbers in the public a/c's were so obviously "wrong". Fraudulent.
Ray Lane and Marc Andreessen were the ones who rammed through the deal at the board level. Lane for massive ego reasons. After been thrown overboard at Oracle in such a humiliating way. Andreessen because he was always full of sh*t. Ever since his days in Urbana, IL. Apotheker was always just a sock puppet. A total fraud who could spin whatever BS needed spinning.
Still waiting for Andreessen and Lane to be charged for what they did at HP. Which broke a whole bunch of SEC regs and state and Federal law. Very much felony territory. Very felony.
Lynch was a guilt as hell. As is Lane and Andreessen. Apotheker was never more than the idiot sidekick.
Ah ha. Now THIS makes sense. Seen that --and "stupider"-- happen many times.
Andreessen I've only seen little bits of, and he's baffled me. Weird alternation of common sense and all over the shop. This sheds a little light: thanks.
I've read various interviews and such with Andreesen since his NCSA days,1 and my impression is that he's someone who got lucky early on with Mosaic (inspired by ViolaWWW) and thus with Netscape, and then was successful at starting and selling not-particularly-exciting businesses such as Loudcloud / Opsware. And then he got lucky again with some bets at AH.
And like many people who get lucky, he appears to assume it's because he's right about everything.
1And possibly had some interaction earlier, as Andreesen worked for IBM Austin as an undergrad on, among other things, the implementation of GL and PHIGS in the AIX 3 X11 server. I had worked on IBM's XPHIGS implementation for the RT PC at TCS in Cambridge, MA; and I worked on the GL-based implementation of Data Explorer/6000. I don't recall his name from that period but it was a long time ago. I may have seen some of his code.
First time I took WWW seriously would have been early 1993 while working literally up the street from the UC Berkeley campus. Mostly a Mac/PC shop but there were a bunch of UNIX workstations kicking around. So pretty much every browser / client that could compile and run was running somewhere in the building. We only had a T1 line. I remember they had got a quote for a T3 line and it was some eyewatering number. Like five figure $ a month. So it stayed at T1 speeds.
Trying to remember first time I heard Andreessen name. Probably late '93. And the word from people who knew him from NCSA and earlier was to say the least, less than flattering. It was a very small world back then and he already had a "reputation". So what happened with Mosaic and Netscape came as no surprise. Nor did way Andreessen was responsible for the implosion and collapse of Netscape. His unrelenting narcissism and big mouth. And just like Gates he was no great technical shakes either.
Andreessen made his money from the Netscape IPO and later buy out and since them he has made a career as one of the gaggle of second / third tier VC firm principles that raise money from the clueless fund managers who know so little about tech that the believe Andreessen PR BS that he "invented the web-browser". Which he did n't. He and Jim Clark were to first to commercialize the browser. That's all.
And the proof that it was just dumb luck and nothing else was that it was Andreessen's big mouth that finally tipped off Bill Gates that his rubbishing the Web as a fad was just another of Bill Gates not a clue tech pontifications. Once Bill got it and that the Web was a threat to MS Monopoly Gates quickly licensed the Spyglass browser code and almost as quickly totally crushed Netscape.
In defense of Netscape at least they were not as stupid as the guy(s) at Spyglass (according to stories doing the rounds at the time) who decided they were going to get one over on MS by just taking a small lump-sum licensing fee up front and a nice juice above the line cut of per copy sales gross revenue. Which turned out to be zero as MS immediately made it a $ zero cost application.
And the moral is - Never try to out shark a shark. Just spear gun them. Its quicker and you are far less likely to end up as chum.
With Chamberlain's death being announced too, I'm sure the conspiracy theorists are going nuts with all this. However, I'm inclined to go with it being a tragic coincidence. We don't have technology capable of summoning the kind of freak storm which sunk the Bayesian and the driver who hit Chamberlain stayed at the scene, making it sound a lot more like an accident than a hit job.
At the heart of all this is a number of people are dead and will be grieving. All the harder for the families of those missing as they don't have body to grieve over.
I'll rephrase. If you throw enough wind at any boat it will go over, and the height of the mast doesn't make a great deal of difference at that point - the windage is coming from the hull, cockpit etc, which is why powerboats with no masts can be blown over. Hurricanes.
What you're describing in harbour sounds like the Katabatic gusts I mentioned above, which can come out of nowhere and destroy an entire habour full of anchored boats under a blue sky. I was hit by one camping under a clear night, it sounded like a freight train coming down the valley and our tents were completely flattened. I've sailed a few thousand miles since then, lots of it in the Med, and the thought of one of those rolling has kept me awake at night.
The current reports say this is a waterspout, and I've never seen any big enough to worry me myself. I presume one big enough to sink a 52m yacht must be tornado scale, and I can't imagine that a tall mast or no mast at all would make much difference at that point.
Eye-witness quotes here (along with CCTV footage) say either it bent to the water & snapped, or that the boat was laid flat. Former from a chap at their "altitude"; latter from a chap apparently higher up.
CCTV from 200m shows the boat there, then not there.
While everyone focuses on disrespectful conspiracy theories the story of a mother briefly losing her 1 year old under violent waves in the sea made this really hit home how awful it is.
I wonder what the conditions were before this or if any warning was given, if it was particularly inclement I know I wouldn't have been there. Been camping with a toddler and noped out to a local B&B for a night when a yellow weather warning hit for a storm and returned the next day when it calmed down. There always has to be a line where you say "this has been nice but the holiday's on hold now"
Virtue signalling? Please get down from your woke ivory tower and grow up a little. Long before you were even a glint in your dad's eye we used to use own experiences as examples to describe how we understand and related to what some other people are going through, adding an example of our own experiences is sharing to bolster the original situation and add some validity. Not every shared experience is just as simple as "virtue siganlling".
I personally never gave a monkey's about news stories with kids involed until I had my own kids 20 years ago and then my attitude changed overnight. Kid's fear is awful to witness 'cos they have little idea what's happening and have little comprehension of danger as they've never experienced it, then something primal kicks into gear in you that makes you ensure kids must survive something even if you don't.
Except that he is not a disgraced businessman. He acted entirely properly in negotiating the sale of Autonomy to HP, and even the US courts agree.
HP couldn't see what I could see, what the accountants at Oracle could see, and what many other commentards here could see; but that is entirely on HP. His duty was to get the best possible deal for his shareholders, and he certainly did that extremely well.
HP's case was shit, and they very much made an own goal with the Autonomy purchase. And I'm just as happy that the US criminal case, which would have achieved little in the way of actual justice, failed. But that doesn't mean Lynch didn't commit fraud. Hussain's conviction and subsequent failed appeal are strong evidence that there was fraud; the findings against Deloitte are strong evidence there was fraud; and the UK civil decision against Lynch and Hussein is very strong evidence of it.
It seems unlikely that if there were fraud at that level, Lynch was not aware of it; and if he didn't know, he should have. So to claim Lynch "acted properly" is unsupportable.
As I said, I'm just as glad the US criminal trial acquitted Lynch. While it's important that fraud have consequences, the UK civil decision, the various long trials, the extradition fight, and the reputational damage seem to me sufficient punishment for Lynch; or at least US prison time would be overcorrecting in the other direction.
That has no bearing on this event, of course. Guilty or not, Lynch didn't deserve this, and the other victims — living and dead — very much did not.
The Federal Attorney who initially prosecuted the case after the Grand Jury indictment was not the Federal Attorney who actually handled presenting the prosecutions case when it finally came to trial.
The politics of who was appointed as US Attorney for the Northern District of California has been "interesting" for the last few decades but the last few appointees previous to the current guy, who was appointed last year, were the first appointments in decades where local patronage did not prevail. Hence not only Lynch's case but much more importantly locally, all the corruption trials in San Francisco City Hall. All perps found guilty over recent years up till recently. All were relatively small fry. Some were senior City employees. The current Federal Prosecutor has shown a very suitable lack of interest in pursuing all the other local political corruption cases. Of which there are some real doozies. Which is why he was appointed.
The Federal case against L:ynch was the classic "Ham Sandwich" case. The evidence was solid so prosecutors presented a no-lose menu of charges at the start of the process. The normal game-play with deep pocked perps like Lynch is to go the jury trial route hoping for a technicality which can be successfully appealed later. The prosecution side was pushing for an early plea bargain. This game can go on for up to a decade or more when deep pocket perps are involved.
What actually happened when the Lynch case came to trial in San Francisco was the new Federal Attorney's trial team were so incompetent in presenting evidence that the jury quite rightly acquitted on all counts. No matter how you look at it the Federal Attorney's office threw the trial. The Federal Attorney offices always plays to win. Unless the politics says otherwise.
To work out the actual who scratched who's back to get the Lynch trial result I'd start with just which law firms and lawyers Lynch's defense team hired or put on retainer for "legal advice". I can think of several local law firms who could actual deliver the result Lynch's team needed. Without any of the messy paper trail. If you have the money, we are talking millions, you can buy some very powerful "legal advice" locally. Starting with a certain lawyer cum politician with an office down on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. A man so humble he even named a bridge after himself.
Welcome to the Deep Pocket Perp legal system. The best that money can buy.
At least we see some genuine info on it. We see the captain has radar and can spot weather before it comes in. Heads back to port if it looks bad. That night watch will wake up the captain if things start to kick off.
The question is, did none of this happen or did it roll in so quick, they didn't have a chance to head back to port?
Or did a billionaire decide to override the captain and make them stay out?
Tornados and waterspouts can appear, touch down suddenly, travel very quickly for hundreds of yards or even miles, but then dissipate.
It is very difficult to forecast exactly where they will appear, or touch down.
I live in tornado alley, and the local forecasters rely on Doppler radar to detect potential tornados. I doubt that the yacht had a Doppler radar setup.
Even if they did, there is no way to out run a tornado, especially if the yacht was anchored in place. By the time they untied themselves, the water spout would have come and gone.
From the BBC news an Italian that lives there that took the reporter out said he doesn't understand why it sunk. He's agreed with me. He said there should of been two on watch all night. He said he's been in smaller boats hit by water spouts and been fine. He's said for it to have taken it so much water on, so quickly, there must of been lots of failings.
He also said it should of been in dock. Suggesting there was enough room for it.
So despite getting the 6 down votes, seems that sailor agreed with me.
I think you would need a marine engineer to tell you why a vessel sank. I'm a sailor but I can't tell you what side loading is required to blow a vessel over, or the speed at which water would enter a specific compartment inside the hull, or how that hull might behave when hit by a tornado.
On one aspect - smaller boats can bob around like corks, whereas large vessels are subjected to much greater internal forces, to the extent where tankers and bulk carriers have been known to snap in half when subjected to the "wrong" wave length (for that vessel).
From what I have read, there were 2 super yachts moored offshore, at night and in a normally sheltered spot. The captain of the other boat has been interviewed and basically said a sudden squall / waterspout rolled in, and they had to start their motor to maintain position in the wind. Once it blew over, the other boat had vanished. They launched their tender and were first on the scene to pick up the survivors, who had reached a life raft. I assume it was one of those automatic ones that release and inflate if the ship sinks?.
Where I live squalls similar to this occasionally roll in off the sea, with waterspouts and small tornadoes. Not the huge super-cell things things they get in the States, but small, short lived squalls. They can be violent enough to wreck houses, bring down trees etc. Strong enough to be scary.
I can see how a moored boat that wasn't "battened down" could be heeled over far enough to start taking on water, and if the occupants didn't get out in time, they went down with it.
Never heard that metaphor used to describe him before. Probably related to the usual lack of quality of tech coverage in the UK MSM.
All software companies do the same thing, and all guys who get rich from it are basically the same as Bill Gates, don’tcha know?
BOTH dead autonomy guys were giving states evidence for plea deals when they died.
Basically HP paid $10 billion for Autonomy....then the HP execs got 100s of millions of that each for pushing ahead with the sale. Lynch n pals got billions.
So HP execs committed gigantic embezzlement, loading up debts to HP for a company barely worth 1/100th of what they said it was.
Really? In his own head, maybe.
But otherwise? By anyone actually familiar with the international software market?
Head of a specialist software house most people have never heard of talks egotistical CEO of once-great hardware mfg into buying them at an exorbitantly stupid price, that I'd go along with.
If microsoft disappeared tomorrow quite a lot of people would be seriously inconvenienced for a long time to come.
Autonomy has disappeared and how many people have been inconvenienced? Not even close.
Of course on a personal note this is a (potential) family tragedy, although AFAIK he's missing, so he could turn up in the next five minutes, or five weeks. A bit rough looking, a bit thinner, but otherwise unharmed.
Until he does so however his family will feel pretty bad. :-(
Actually till you mentioned them, no.
I see an outfit that sounds like they can get you "House" in buzzword bingo with a market cap of $7Bn that has since decayed to about 1/2 that.
Hmmm. This pattern sound oddly familiar.
Brian did quite a lot of development in the early days, AIUI. (I wasn't with the company then.) And he was quite successful at running the company for its first decade, until the accounting stumble in 1987 and subsequent few years of relative doldrums before he turned the reins over in '93.
Autonomy has disappeared
But its products have not. Some were retained by HP; IDOL and others went to Micro Focus and are now owned (and sold) by OpenText. So if your point is "no one depends on Autonomy products", you have failed to support it.
Just as he been acquitted of wrongdoing in the HP fraud case, something that had been ongoing for 10+ years. Should have been looking forward to living his life. Horrible for all those who are lost.
I do wonder at the yacht itself. It's a sailboat - respect for that actually, compared to the usual gas guzzlers in that field. But my general gut feeling looking at big yachts is that, foot-for-foot, compared to similarly sized boats, very fancy luxury yachts almost always look top-heavy and unseaworthy.
Clearly plenty of fishermen entrust their lives to 60' trawlers in say the Pacific Northwest. Most of the 60' yachts I see in Vancouver harbor, I'd barely trust out of the Puget Sound/Salish Sea area (basically, a sheltered inland body of water) on a clear summer day and I'd definitely aim never to be more than 6 hours away from a sheltered harbor along the coastline even then.
Sailing yachts have huge, multi-tonne keels underneath.
They don't fall over easily, and are far more stable than any gin palace motoryacht and probably anything of a similar.
If you see that kind of weather coming you reef the sails and batten down, same as a fishing vessel lowers and stows their booms.
If you don't see it coming, on the other hand... Waterspouts are hard to predict and utterly terrifying.
You're quite possibly right. Yes, yes, I know it's a sailboat. Yet, I wouldn't automatically assume seaworthiness is top-of-mind even on sailboat yachts, a format I am less familiar with than motorized yachts.
It definitely could be the effect of a very localized phenomenon like a narrow waterspout. However, there are certainly a lot of people commenting on the internet and claiming to know enough to shoot down any ship safety concerns, yet it's still down at the bottom innit? After being reported as flipped over by its neighbor - another, 42m, sail yacht - something that shouldn't have mattered, according to you. And with limited reports of other sunk boats and lost lives in that harbor.
I'll be watching what the investigations will have to say, that's all.
I'm sure there will some who will point to the fact that Mike Lynch co-defendant was killed by a car accident in virtually the same time as some sort evidence of conspiracy
However I will remind them that coincidences happen so often we have a name for them, and this case tragically, this was one of those occasions
and some coincidences do give pause for thought...
Going back many years one night there were two car crashes within minutes of each other on (different) roads out of a local town.
In both cases the male driver who caused the crash died and had the same surnames and age. The young woman drivers (both survived but with life changing injuries), who's vehicle they drove into had the same surnames, similar ages and both had recently married, and both were on the way home from seeing the same play. The other strange part of the case was the men's surnames were the same as the maiden surnames of the women they drove into, yet no one was related...
So basically Mike Lynch's boat "sinks" all by itself.
Then the Other autonomy guy who agreed to turn states evidence in exchange for a plea deal "gets run over" by an HP/Autonomy contractor employee who 'co-incidentally' was in the same foreign country as the guy....
Yeah these WEREN'T assassinations by the Boeing "lets do it badly" whistlblower murder book
Wikipedia: "Bayes' theorem ... gives a mathematical rule for inverting conditional probabilities, allowing us to find the probability of a cause given its effect."
Effect: Yacht "Bayesian" sinks
Probability: Around 100%
Maybe the name of the yacht was a name too far?
When I heard that Mike Lynch was missing/presumed dead after a yacht accident, I had to come for the comments.
Then I found out about Stephen Chamberlain and, well, the commentariate did not let us down.
52 METER yacht, so 170 FEET long, with a 72.3 METER mast (second longest on the water according to what I read) that mast is 235 FEET.
Such a craft would be carrying well over 400 feet of rode, plus at least 75 feet of chain, more likely 100 feet, for the anchors (yes plural). (rode being either rope or wire cable, lighter than chain)
Its unlikely that she laid over from *just* the wind, but if the waterspout ran her over it would be possible for it to both tip her over, and also to snap the mast, perhaps high enough up that the top portion of the mast punched a fairly large hole in the hull, as it would have been under tremendous torque from the stays. (Thats a LOT of mast to stablize)
I take no position on Autonomy/HP issues, other than to note that when the deal was announced I asked myself *who faked the audits?*
Mike L and several others are missing and possibly dead, I hope their friends and family get the answers and the peace they will need in the near future.
The accident that took Stephen was just that. My sympathies to the Chamberlains.
As for conspiracies, well, I think we've seen most of them listed here. It certainly looks conspiratorial, but I don't think HP could manipulate *paper* let alone the weather.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
