A British mother aboard a yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily has told how she held her baby daughter above the surface of the sea to save her from drowning.
The mother, identified locally as Charlotte Golunski, her partner and one-year-old daughter are believed to be among 15 people rescued from the luxury yacht Bayesian early Monday.
Six people, including British entrepreneur Mike Lynch, are missing and a man was found dead outside the rubble.
The 56-metre (183-foot) ship, which was carrying 10 crew and 12 passengers, sank half a mile off Palermo after encountering a severe storm overnight that caused waterspouts, or rotating columns of air, to appear above the sea.
Charlotte told Italian newspaper La Repubblica that her family survived because she was on deck when the yacht sank.
She said they were woken by “thunder, lightning and waves rocking our boat” and felt like it was “the end of the world” before being thrown into the water.
“For two seconds I lost my daughter in the sea, then I quickly hugged her in the midst of the fury of the waves,” she told the newspaper.
Charlotte said she was keeping her baby “afloat with all her might, arms stretched upwards to stop him drowning.”
“It was dark. In the water, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I screamed for help, but all I could hear around me was the screams of others,” she added.
A lifeboat was inflated and, she said, 11 people were able to board. The three family members were unharmed and taken to hospital for examinations.
Karsten Borner, captain of a nearby boat, said his crew had taken some survivors onto a life raft, including three who were seriously injured.
Describing the moment the storm hit, he told Italian media outlet Rai that the superyacht rolled onto its side and sank within “minutes”.
“It all happened in a very short time,” he said.
A local fisherman, Giuseppe, told Reuters he was on a motorboat when he saw “mats and T-shirts floating in the sea”.
Another witness, Fabio Cefalù, captain of a trawler, says that he was preparing to go on a fishing trip when he saw lightning and so he stayed in port.
“At around 4:15 a.m. we saw a flare in the sea,” he said, according to the EVN news agency.
“We waited for this waterspout to pass. After 10 minutes, we went out to sea and saw cushions and all the rest of the boat. [that had sunk]and all that was on deck, at sea. However, we saw no one in the sea.
Another fisherman described seeing the yacht “sink with his own eyes”.
Speaking to the Giornale di Sicilia newspaper, the witness said he was at home when the tornado struck.
“Then I saw the boat, it had only one mast, it was very big,” he said.
Shortly afterwards he went to the bay of Santa Nicolicchia in Porticello, the fishing village near Palermo where the disaster took place, to get a better look at what was happening.
He added: “The boat was still floating, then all of a sudden it disappeared. I saw it sink with my own eyes.”
