A British mother on board a yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily has described how she carried her baby girl out to sea to save her from drowning.
It was reported that the mother, local resident Charlotte Golunski, her partner and one-year-old daughter were among the 15 people rescued from the Bayes luxury yacht earlier on Monday.
Six people, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, were missing and a man was found dead outside the wreckage.
The 56 m (183 ft) vessel, carrying a crew of 10 and 12 passengers, sank half a mile off the coast of Palermo after encountering a storm during the night that caused a waterspout, or rotating column of air, to appear offshore.
Charlotte told Italian newspaper La Repubblica that her family survived because they were on deck when the yacht sank.
She said they were woken up by “thunder, lightning and waves that made our boat dance” and it felt like “the end of the world” before they were thrown into the water.
The newspaper quoted her as saying: “I lost my daughter for two seconds in the ocean and then quickly hugged her in the crashing waves.”
Charlotte said she “held her baby above the water with all my strength, my arms stretched upward to prevent her from drowning”.
“It was dark. I couldn’t keep my eyes open in the water. I screamed for help, but all I could hear around me was the screams of other people,” she added.
She said 11 people successfully climbed into the lifeboat after it was inflated.
Carsten Bonner, the captain of a nearby ship, said his crew used life rafts to rescue some survivors, three of whom were seriously injured.
He told Italian news outlet Rai that the superyacht overturned and sank “within minutes” as he described the moment the storm hit.
“It all happened in a very short period of time,” he said.
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, said he was about to go fishing when he suddenly saw lightning, so he stayed in the port.
“At around 4:15 a.m. we saw a flare over the sea,” he said, according to EVN news agency.
“We waited for the waterspout to pass. After 10 minutes we went out to sea and saw the mat and all the other parts of the boat [that had sunk]and everything on deck at sea. However, we didn’t see anyone in the ocean.
Another fisherman described “witnessing the yacht sinking with my own eyes.”
An eyewitness told Diario de Sicily that he was at home when the tornado struck.
“Then I saw the ship, and it had just one mast and was very big,” he said.
Soon after, he traveled to the Bay of San Nicodechia in the fishing village of Porticello near Palermo, where the disaster occurred, to better understand what happened.
He added: “The boat was still floating and then suddenly it disappeared. I saw it sink with my own eyes.”
