Luckily the crew of the yacht Blue Vision were still up at 1.30am, otherwise there would have been no one to notice the fire taking hold. Speaking to investigators after the inferno in September 2021, they described “intermittent bright flashes” on the aft deck of the 35-metre Tansu yacht Siempre, moored stern-to a few places down the quay in the Port of Olbia.
What happened next unfolded quickly. “They stated that the fire soon spread across the aft deck and that they observed that within seconds, the flames reached a height of between two and 2.5 metres,” according to the report published afterwards by Malta's Marine Safety Investigation Unit. “In the meantime, the crew of Siempre, who were asleep in the cabins, were alerted by the yacht's fire alarm. The chief engineer ran up the interior stairway to investigate and, on reaching the saloon on the main deck, he observed a large fire on the aft deck. He ran back to the crew's accommodation and instructed the rest of the crew members to vacate… through the escape hatches on the yacht's bow.”
The chief engineer tried to fight the blaze by attaching a hose to the fire pump, and a neighbouring yacht trained its fire hose on the blaze as well. The fire brigade arrived 20 minutes later, by which time the flames had spread to the bridge deck. “Moments later, all four crew members of jumped into the water from the bow,” continues the report. By 2.30am, the yacht was
