It was a non sequitur for the ages.

“The ship was an unsinkable ship.”

The statement was made after the ship sank.

The ship is Bayesian, a 184-foot-long sailboat that now rests under 160 feet of water.

The superyacht had been on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea for several days when the CEO of Italian Sea Group, owner of Perini Navi, the company that built Bayesian, proclaimed its unsinkability.

Bayesian sank minutes after being hit by a squall or microburst while at anchor off the Sicilian port of Porticello last August. 

More than that sad fact disproves the unsinkability claim. Analyses by naval architects and engineers have concluded that the vessel, built in 2008 for its original owner at a cost of 30 million pounds, was more vulnerable to sinking than other superyachts or, for that matter, the typical production-built boats many readers of this magazine sail.

The sinking was a maritime disaster, a human tragedy and a shocking story that captured worldwide attention. Seven people were killed, including the owner, British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, and his 18-year-old daughter. Among the 15 survivors were a mother who held her 1-year-old child above the water until a life raft could reach them.

There is controversy over what contributed to Bayesian’s fate, but it is not disputed that the yacht capsized. It was knocked on its side by a sudden blast of straight-line wind, and never came up. 

Metrics examined by yacht designers and shipbuilding engineers point to the vessel’s inherent instability. 

The off-the-shelf cruising and racing boats many of us sail bounce back up after a knockdown, even one that heels the boat to 90 degrees or more. Accounts of boats caught by a squall with spinnakers up and then broaching to the point of spreaders touching the water are occasional features of post-race storytelling. The boats right themselves after the spinnakers are dealt with and sail on.

These boats generally have a limit of positive stability, more dramatically known as the angle of vanishing stability (AVN), of 120 to 130 degrees, meaning they can tip to that angle and still right themselves.

The New York Times acquired a copy of the safety documents submitted to the American Bureau of Shipping and other agencies for certification of Bayesian’s build and design. Experts who reviewed them found the yacht had an AVN of around 90 degrees when its adjustable keel was at its maximum draft of 32 feet. When the keel was in the raised position, as it reportedly was at the time of the sinking, stability vanished at only 75 degrees.

The yacht’s marginal stability was in part a product of a bragging right demanded by its first owner. He wanted the tallest mast in the world, and he got it in a 237-foot aluminum spar. The mast was 40 feet taller than the main mast of the originally specified ketch rig. Bayesian’s custom cutter-rig boasted a total sail area of 32,000 square feet.

For perspective, Bayesian’s expanse of sail, equal to three-quarters of an acre, was more than double the sail area of the 1903 America’s Cup winner Reliance, a 200-foot cutter that at the time was said to have the largest mainsail ever made. Its mast was 199
feet high.

Bayesian’s original owner paid a price for his one-of-a-kind mast in both pounds sterling and pounds of weight. The mast weighed 24 tons. It was a massive counter weight to the boat’s ballast that gained leverage as the heel angle increased.

Mast vanity impacted the ballast in another way. To balance the outsized mast’s impact on stability, Bayesian was built with substantially heavier ballast than sisterships, a total of 220 tons in the keel and fixed keel box. Naturally, the boat floated lower as a result, which seems to be another piece in the puzzle of how an unsinkable boat can sink.

The essential machinery of superyachts includes complex generator-powered HVAC systems designed to run 24/7. The systems need air, and in Perini boats vents are built into the hull. In extreme heeling the vents will be submerged well before the boat reaches its AVN. With lower freeboard, the Bayesian vents were closer to the water than on sisterships. Were the vents open with the air conditioning running on a warm summer night?

Most likely, but the chief of Italian Sea Group is claiming the sinking had to be the result of water flooding through other openings, such as hatches, a watertight door to the engine room and a big sliding glass door. He blames the captain and crew leaving them open.

This, of course, explains the reason for the ridiculous statement that the sunken boat was unsinkable.

In its 6,000-word treatise of the Bayesian sinking, the New York Times reported that divers exploring the wreck had not seen any open hatches, and video footage showed the engine room door was closed.

The nautical drama of the Bayesian sinking may end up as a courtroom drama. Authorities plan to raise the wreck to gather evidence. The captain and two of his crew have been informed by Italian prosecutors that they are under investigation for possible negligence. They will need some good lawyers to navigate Italy’s justice system when so much is at stake for a high-profile Italian company that describes itself on its website as “one of the largest companies in the international yachting industry.”

If a trial ensues, defense attorneys will be remiss if they don’t introduce evidence that the grand superyacht Bayesian, for all of its tens of millions of dollars worth of luxury, technology and Perini Navi pedigree, was not as seaworthy as the average production-built monohull sailboats that fill marinas.

Meanwhile, the race to dominance in the my-mast-is-bigger competition among the oligarch class goes on, with Amazon man Jeff Bezos currently claiming the title with not just one mast 280 feet high, but three of them on his 417-foot, half-billion-dollar schooner Koru. The vessel was launched last year, but no word is out yet about its angle of vanishing stability.