Captain Sandy Yawn, the star of Below Deck, said Monday that the captain of the $40m superyacht which sank off the coast of Sicily is being made “an easy target” by Italian authorities.
Seven people, including British tech billionaire Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, died on Aug. 19, when the 184-foot Bayesian sank after being hit by a sudden and violent storm at 4 a.m. local time. Fifteen people, including the captain, James Cutfield, and all but one of the crew, survived. Autopsies are due to be soon carried out on the bodies of those who died.
On Monday Italian authorities announced they had opened a formal investigation into Cutfield for manslaughter and “negligent shipwreck”—although no formal charges may follow.
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“I absolutely stand behind the captain,” Yawn told the Daily Beast. “It’s always easy to blame the captain, but on what basis? There is no evidence yet that he or his crew did anything wrong.”
Under maritime law, Cutfield holds final responsibility for the well-being of all passengers and crew aboard the Bayesian. Police have questioned him twice, and authorities have not yet indicated whether any of the surviving crew will be placed under investigation.
“We weren’t there, and we don’t know, but I think the captain is being accused unfairly in this case,” Yawn said. “He wasn’t sailing in a storm. The boat was on anchor, and extreme, crazy weather comes out of nowhere. All captains have experienced storms when we are on anchor. That’s nothing unusual. It’s too soon for the authorities to press any charges. How could you possibly know everything in this amount of time to make any decision about the captain?”
Yawn, speaking from the Mediterranean where she is captaining a 154-foot yacht, said she had her own experience of being investigated, when she was initially blamed for a fire on board a ship in the Red Sea in 2003.
“It was the equipment that failed,” she said. “Instead of thanking me for no lives being lost and the boat not sinking, the authorities tried to sue me and say it was my fault. I battled it for five years. The captain gets blamed every time.”
British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter, Hannah Lynch, pose for a photo, in this undated handout image obtained by Reuters on August 23, 2024.
Lynch Family Handout/Handout via ReutersYawn said she knew the punishing toll of being under investigation. “It’s that feeling that something that you’ve worked your entire life to become can be taken away overnight for something that wasn’t your fault. It’s not this captain’s fault, it’s Mother Nature’s.
“Incidents like this might make you say ‘no’ a lot more to captaining boats, but they don’t put me off sailing. We just have to have that captain’s back. I would advise him to stick to the facts, and surround himself with people who believe in him. I’m all for this captain. I’m behind this captain. It’s not fair.”
Yawn said she had also gotten “hit by a waterspout”—a tornadic waterspout is one of the extreme meteorological phenomena possibly responsible for the Bayesian’s sinking—off Cape Canaveral, Florida.
It knocked the 67-foot vessel she was helming on to its side. “It wasn’t a sailboat, so it didn’t have a mast to break,” Yawn recalled, “but it ripped off our radar completely.
“The rain was so hard you couldn’t see the bow of the boat. There was lightning and thunder as we tried to make way back to the shore, but the storm was moving faster than the boat. I didn’t see the waterspout. I had no idea there was a waterspout inside that storm. There’s nothing you can do. Extreme weather comes out of nowhere.
Bayesian, a 56-meter-long sailboat, which later sank off the Sicilian capital Palermo, is seen in Santa Flavia, Italy August 18, 2024 in this picture obtained from social media.
Baia Santa Nicolicchia/Fabio La Bianca/via Reuters“All you have is the weather you can see coming on the radar. You batten down the hatches, make sure the anchor is secure, and you ride the storm out.”
Mystery still surrounds the sinking of the Bayesian while it was anchored about half a mile off the Sicilian port of Porticello. “It drives me insane,” Giovanni Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, which in 2022 bought the company that made the yacht, told the New York Times. “Following all the proper procedures, that boat is unsinkable.”
Yawn said the key question is why the Bayesian’s mast broke. Other questions surrounded why hatches were said to be open, which she said was likely to be windows left open for fresh air while at anchor, and what happened immediately after the storm struck, including whether emergency batteries worked and whether people got hurt trying to get out safely.
“But you can’t out-power a storm,” she said. “Who knows how strong the winds were that night. That’s why buildings collapse. Look at what tornados do to homes. Look at what happened in the Carolinas, and the house that just floated out to sea. You can’t fight Mother Nature, and sometimes Mother Nature surprises you,” she said.
The notion that a captain goes down with their ship is “something for history books,” Yawn said. “The reality is I am very sure the captain did all he could to locate as many people on board as he could, and get them to safety. I’ve always heard great things about him, I’ve never heard anything negative.”
She added, “It’s sad. I would say to him, ‘Hang in there,’ and that this industry is behind him. We believe in him, I personally don’t think it’s his fault. I think the authorities are being premature, and should maybe take a step back and get all the facts. Why so fast?
“I guarantee you, out there every captain reading about the Bayesian is saying, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ It could happen to any one of us.”
