British Tech CEO’s Body Recovered from Sunken Yacht, Daughter Still Missing

A timeline of the doomed voyage and rescue efforts

The body of British tech entre­pre­neur Mike Lynch was recov­ered from the wreck­age of his lux­u­ry yacht off the coast of Italy, but his daugh­ter remains one of the last vic­tims miss­ing in the tragedy.

Lynch, 59, found­ed the soft­ware com­pa­ny Auton­o­my which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $11 bil­lion in 2011. He had recent­ly been acquit­ted of fraud charges in the US relat­ed to the acquisition.

To cel­e­brate his legal vic­to­ry, Lynch invit­ed friends and fam­i­ly aboard his $40 mil­lion yacht Bayesian for a voy­age in the Mediter­ranean sea. How­ev­er, strong storms bat­tered the ves­sel on August 20th, caus­ing it to cap­size and sink near the coast of Sicily.

In the after­math, divers spent sev­er­al days nav­i­gat­ing the 160 foot depths to search the sub­merged wreck. They were ham­pered by lim­it­ed under­wa­ter time of just 12 min­utes per dive due to the pressure.

The body of the ship’s chef was the first recov­ered. In the fol­low­ing days, the remains of Lynch’s guests — a New York lawyer, his wife, and a Mor­gan Stan­ley exec­u­tive and his spouse — were also locat­ed and identified.

Final­ly on August 22nd, Lynch’s corpse was pulled from the hull and trans­port­ed by ambu­lance. How­ev­er, his 18-year-old daugh­ter Han­nah trag­i­cal­ly remains the sole miss­ing vic­tim. Res­cue work­ers vowed to con­tin­ue the search until all pas­sen­gers were account­ed for.

Lynch’s wife Angela and 14 oth­ers includ­ing an infant man­aged to aban­don ship before it over­turned. Angela has since described cut­ting her feet on glass float­ing in the water dur­ing her des­per­ate escape.

As divers map the pre­car­i­ous wreck, weath­ered divers work against the clock to bring clo­sure to the fam­i­lies of those still lost at sea. This ongo­ing recov­ery oper­a­tion shows the dif­fi­cul­ties of search­ing deep under­wa­ter for vic­tims of mar­itime disasters.