One minute the superyacht Bayesian was there. The next it had sunk.
A witness described how the £30 million boat simply disappeared from view, battered by strong winds off the coast of Sicily.
As the sun rose over the fishing village of Porticello, the havoc caused in the wake of what some described as a tornado had become clear. One person dead and six people missing from a yacht that now rests 200ft under the sea.
Mike Lynch, a British tech tycoon, is among those missing. Angela Bacares, his wife, was rescued.
It was only in June that Mr Lynch had been cleared of fraud charges in a US court, after he was found not guilty on all counts of an accusation of inflating the value of Autonomy, the company he sold in 2011 for £8.6 billion to Hewlett-Packard, the US tech giant.
In the wake of his acquittal, Mr Lynch, a tech genius who has been described as Britain’s Bill Gates, is thought to have treated his family and staff at his venture capital firm Invoke Capital to a Mediterranean cruise.