Amer F100 Angiola II Sinks Four Days After Its Handover Off Sardinia

A four-day-old handover ends on the rocks off Capo Ferro

Angiola II left her berth on the evening of Tuesday, 11 August, for a cruise in the waters between Capo Ferro and the Isola dei Cappuccini, the stretch of Sardinia's Costa Smeralda that runs past Porto Cervo and Poltu Quatu. The 29.6-metre motor yacht, an Amer F100 built by Permare's Amer Yachts brand, carried 14 people that evening: crew and guests of the Italian entrepreneur who had taken delivery of her only four days earlier. Within hours the yacht was on her side in roughly 7 metres of water, her hull open to the sea and her new owner among the last aboard before the coast guard arrived.

The vessel had not just been built. Angiola II is the current name for a hull launched by Permare in July 2020 and previously known as Arsana and, before that, The Limbo - a 145-gross-tonne yacht with five guest cabins, four Volvo Penta engines and a 26-knot top speed, designed by Verme Projects with interiors by Wilmotte & Associes Architectes. What happened four days before the sinking was a change of ownership and name, not a first sea trial off the builder's yard, and that distinction matters to how the incident should be read.

Fire in the engine room, then water where it should not be

Italian reporting on the incident, corroborated across multiple outlets, describes a fault in the engine room that triggered a small fire, contained quickly, but not before it compromised the hull's integrity enough to let water in. Buoyancy went from there: the ingress outpaced whatever the bilge pumps could clear, and Angiola II settled onto her side rather than sinking upright. No flag-state or class investigation findings had been published as this went to press, so the precise mechanical failure behind the fire, and why it let water in rather than staying an isolated engine-room event, remains provisional.

What is established is the timeline: the malfunction, the fire, then the list, playing out fast enough that the crew moved twelve of the fourteen aboard onto a nearby vessel before the yacht went fully onto her side, while the owner and one guest stayed aboard until an Italian Coast Guard patrol boat, CP 870 out of the La Maddalena station, came alongside. Nobody was hurt in a sequence that, on a smaller or less well-crewed boat at night, more easily ends badly.

Fourteen aboard, a coast guard patrol boat, and no pollution

The response is the part of this story that worked. La Maddalena's Coast Guard station had CP 870 on scene fast enough to take off the last two people before the hull settled, and the twelve already transferred to a nearby vessel were landed at Poltu Quatu without injury. Authorities deployed containment booms around the wreck and reported no fuel leak, so an eight-figure hull loss on one of the world's most photographed coastlines did not become a pollution story on top of it - a distinction that matters in the Costa Smeralda, where a slick would have reached beaches and marinas within a tide or two.

It also matters for what comes next. Angiola II now rests on her side in about 7 metres of water between Capo Ferro and Porto Cervo, close enough to shore and shallow enough that a full loss of the hull is not the default outcome - salvors have a workable job, not a deep-water recovery.

What 'delivered four days earlier' actually meant

For an owner reading this from the outside, the detail that will sting hardest is the four days. A yacht that fails within a week of handover invites the obvious question: what did the pre-delivery survey and sea trial actually test, and did whatever failed in the engine room show up on paper before the money changed hands? Angiola II's history complicates that question rather than simplifying it. She is not a new-build handed over fresh from the yard with warranty obligations running from day one; she is a six-year-old hull that has carried two names before this one, sold on to a new owner in early August 2026, whose own pre-purchase survey - standard practice on any resale of this size - is what should have flagged an engine-room fault of this severity, if the fault was detectable at all before it happened.

None of the public reporting names the surveyor, the selling broker or the insurer, and none of it says whether the failure was the kind that a competent pre-purchase survey could reasonably have caught. That gap is the story's most useful lesson for anyone buying a similar-sized used yacht this season: a survey covers what it can see and test in the time allotted, not everything that can fail in the following week, and a four-day gap between handover and total loss is a reminder that acceptance of a vessel is a legal moment, not a guarantee.

The bill: a 200-tonne pontoon and a claim nobody has priced publicly

Recovery is under way. A pontoon rated to 200 tonnes has been contracted to refloat Angiola II from her resting position, a job that - assuming the hull is salvageable rather than a constructive total loss - will run into the hundreds of thousands of euros before any repair begins on a yacht valued at more than EUR 8 million before the incident. Nobody involved has published a number for the claim, who is insuring it, or whether the hull will be repaired and put back on the market or written off and sold as a shell.

That silence is itself informative. A sale, survey and total loss inside the same fortnight is exactly the sequence a hull and machinery insurer prices for when underwriting a resale of this size, and the premium a buyer pays on a six-year-old 30-metre boat reflects risk like this even when it never materialises. For anyone shopping the used market at this size this year, Angiola II is now the cautionary case study broker's risk committees will reach for - not because the cause is unusual, but because the timing between handover and total loss removes any room to argue the buyer had time to find what the survey missed.