The 56-metre British-flagged sailing yacht Bayesian was anchored some 700 metres off the port of Porticello, east of Palermo, and was carrying 10 crew members and 12 passengers when it was struck by a waterspout before dawn on Monday.
Fifteen people aboard, including a mother and her one-year-old baby, were plucked to safety but the body of one man, reported to be the yacht's chef, was found a few hours later.
On Tuesday, divers searching for the six people still missing strapped on oxygen bottles and began their descent in choppy seas to the wreck, some 50 metres below the surface.
Because of the depth, each dive is restricted to 12 minutes each, including two minutes for descending and ascending, according to Luca Cari, a spokesman for Italy's fire service.
The passengers were guests of Mike Lynch – a celebrated tech entrepreneur and investor sometimes referred to as the 'UK's Bill Gates'.
Lynch's wife Angela Bacares was among 15 people rescued, but the businessman and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were missing, according to Salvo Cocina, head of the Civil Protection Agency in Sicily.
The chair of Morgan Stanley International, Jonathan Bloomer, who testified for Lynch in a fraud case in the US, was also missing alongside his wife, Judy, UK insurance provider Hiscox said on Tuesday.
Bloomer is the chair of Hiscox, which issued a statement saying it was "deeply shocked and saddened" by the incident.
Christopher Morvillo of law firm Clifford Chance, who represented Lynch, was also on the boat along with his wife, media reports said.
Lynch, 59, was acquitted on all charges in a San Francisco court in early June after he was accused of an $11-billion fraud linked to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
Divers trained to work in tight spaces were flown in from Rome and Sardinia late on Monday, but the search was made difficult by the fact the yacht remains largely intact.
Marco Tilotta, from the Palermo divers' unit, said some of the divers had worked on the wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which sank off Tuscany in 2012, killing 32 people.
Tilotta told AFP that search efforts were concentrated on getting inside the sleeping and living areas of the yacht, which was lying on its side.
A search of the bridge earlier on Tuesday was unsuccessful.
"The spaces inside the boat are very tight and if you encounter an obstacle it is very complicated to move forward, just as it is very difficult to find alternative routes," Cari said.
The luxury vessel was moored off Porticello, east of Palermo, when violent winds and rain hit the coast.
"It was terrible. The boat was hit by really strong wind and shortly after it went down," survivor Charlotte Golunski told the ANSA news agency.
Golunski, board director at Luminance, a software company founded by Lynch, lost hold of her one-year-old daughter in the waves "for two seconds", before managing to grab her "while the sea raged".
"Lots of people were screaming" in the dark, said Golunski, who managed to get on a life raft.
Karsten Borner, the captain of another yacht anchored nearby at the time of the storm, said there was a "very strong hurricane gust" and he had to battle to keep his vessel steady.
Borner saw the Bayesian's mast "bend and then snap", according to Italy's Corriere della Sera.
Italian authorities have opened a probe into the incident, while the UK's marine accident investigation unit is sending four inspectors to Palermo.
The Bayesian was built by Italian shipbuilding firm Perini Navi in 2008 and boasted a 75-metre mast – the tallest aluminium sailing mast in the world, according to the Charter World website.
The boat was reportedly owned by Lynch's family, and was named after the Bayesian statistical theory, which assesses the probability of something happening.
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