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PORTICELLO, SICILY —Divers searching the wreck of a superyacht that sank off Sicily found the bodies of five passengers Wednesday and searched for one more as questions intensified about why the vessel sank so quickly when a nearby sailboat remained largely unscathed.
Rescue crews brought four body bags ashore into port at Porticello. Salvatore Cocina, head of the Sicily civil protection agency, said a fifth body had been located. Divers at the scene said they would try to recover it Thursday while continuing the search for the sixth.
The discovery made clear the operation to search the hull on the seabed 50 meters under water had quickly turned into a recovery, not a rescue, given the amount of time that had passed and with no signs of life emerging over three days of searching.
The Bayesian, a 56-meter British-flagged yacht, went down in a storm early Monday as it was moored about a kilometer offshore. Civil protection officials said they believed the ship was struck by a tornado over the water, known as a waterspout, and sank quickly.
Fifteen people escaped in a lifeboat and were rescued by a nearby sailboat. One body was recovered Monday - that of the ship's chef, Recaldo Thomas, of Antigua.
Thomas was born in Canada, according to his cousin David Isaac, but would visit his parents' homeland of Antigua as a child, moving permanently to the tiny eastern Caribbean island in his early 20s. Italian officials previously listed Antigua and Canada as the home countries of the people on board.
The fate of six missing passengers had driven the search effort, including British tech magnate Mike Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter and associates who had successfully defended him in a recent U.S. federal fraud trial.
Lynch's spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Meanwhile, investigators from the Termini Imerese Public Prosecutor's Office were acquiring evidence for their criminal investigation, which they opened immediately after the tragedy even though no formal suspects have been publicly identified.
Questions have abounded about what caused the superyacht, built in 2008 by Italian shipyard Perini Navi, to sink so quickly, when the nearby Sir Robert Baden Powell sailboat was largely spared.
Giovanni Costantino, head of the Italian Sea Group, which owns the shipmaker, blamed human error for the disaster, which he said took 16 minutes. "The ship sank because it took on water. From where, the investigators will say," he told RAI state television after he met with prosecutors.
Costantino cited AIS ship tracking data that he said showed the Bayesian had taken on water for four minutes when a sudden gust of wind flipped it and it continued taking on water. The ship straightened up slightly and then went down, he said.
Questions about keel
But was it merely the case of a freak waterspout that knocked the ship to its side and allowed water to pour in through open hatches? What was the position of the keel, which on a large sailboat like the Bayesian might have been retractable, to allow it to enter shallower ports?
"There's a lot of uncertainty as to whether it had a lifting keel and whether it might have been up," said Jean-Baptiste Souppez, a fellow of the Royal Institute of Naval Architects and the editor of the Journal of Sailing Technology. "But if it had, then that would reduce the amount of stability that the vessel had, and therefore made it easier for it to roll over on its side," he said in an interview.
The captain of the sailboat that came to the Bayesian's rescue said his craft had sustained minimal damage - the frame of a sun awning broke - even with winds that he estimated reached 12 on the Beaufort wind scale, which is the highest hurricane-strength force on the scale.
He said he had remained anchored with his engines running to try to maintain the ship's position as the storm, which was forecast, rolled in.
"Another possibility is to heave anchor before the storm and to run downwind at open sea," Karsten Bornersaid in a text message. But he said that might not have been a viable option for the Bayesian, given its trademark 75-meter (246-foot) mast.
"If there was a stability problem, caused by the extremely tall mast, it would not have been better at open sea," he said.
Yachts like the Bayesian are required to have watertight subcompartments that are specifically designed to prevent a rapid, catastrophic sinking even when some parts fill with water.
"So for the vessel to sink, especially this fast, you are really looking at taking water on board very quickly, but also in a number of locations along the length of the vessel, which again indicates that it might have been rolled over on its side," Souppez said.
Italian coast guard and fire rescue divers continued the underwater search in dangerous and time-consuming conditions. Because of the wreck's depth, which requires special precautions, divers working in tag teams could only spend about 12 minutes at a time searching, though reinforcements outfitted with special equipment to enable longer dives were also on the wreck Wednesday.
In all, 27 divers were taking rotations, including four who helped with the recovery of the 2012 Costa Concordia disaster off Tuscany. They called the Porticello wreck a "little Concordia," fire crews said in a statement.
The limited dive time was designed in part to avoid decompression sickness, also known as the "bends," which can occur when divers stay underwater for long periods and ascend too quickly, allowing nitrogen gas dissolved in the blood to form bubbles.
"The longer you stay, the slower your ascent has to be," said Simon Rogerson, the editor of SCUBA magazine. He said the tight turnaround time suggested the operation's managers were trying to limit the risks and recovery time after each dive.