Scuttlebutt now has Steve's version of the story...

TROUBLE IN TORONTO
With the America’s Cup moving toward winged multihulls, the C-Class
catamaran has been in the spotlight. Unfortunately for Steve Clark, who is
one of the godfathers of the class, his latest design Aethon (USA 104) has
recently experienced a couple of notable failures. The first was during the
2010 International C-Class Catamaran Championship (August 22-28) in Newport,
RI, when Clark and crew Oliver Moore capsized and destroyed their wing
seconds after the start of the first race. The latest was this week in
Toronto, where Clark had hoped to test Aethon (USA 104) against the winner
of the 2010 ICCC, Fred Eaton and Magnus Clarke on Canaan (CAN 9). Steve
picks up the story here:
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We went to Toronto to sail with Fred and Magnus. Oliver and I were trying to
get some closure after crashing so spectacularly in Newport. How good is
this platform really? Fred wanted to know as well, so he agreed to loan us
the Orion (CAN 8) wing for a few days of two boat testing. It would not be
exactly a recreation of what could have happened in Newport, but it should
be mutually instructive.

We assembled and set out (on Tuesday, Sept. 21st), winds were south 12-15,
but the Lake Ontario sea state was doing its big confused wave thing. So
while it wasn't necessarily windy, it was pretty testing. Oliver and I don't
really agree on whether or not we would have been racing in those
conditions. Fred Eaton was in the middle of a family emergency, so Canaan
was being helmed by Magnus Clark with Rob Paterson as crew. They were
cautious because this is not their best team and so were showing an
abundance of caution.

After sailing upwind for several miles, we turned back toward the harbor.
Magnus was being very cautious with their varsity boat. I on the other hand
was trying to make Aethon go fast in a confused sea state. I had given a lot
of thought to this during the design process and so was testing how well
those compromises had worked. So we weren't just sailing back to the beach
but experimenting with different crew positions, sailing angles and wing
settings in order to get Aethon settled down and trucking.

About 2 miles from shore there was a loud crack/bang and the platform folded
up. The wing went down in between the bows and Oliver and I are the meat in
a wing nut taco. The rescue effort was difficult and ultimately not much of
the wing was salvaged. The Toronto Police were testing propellers on their
big RIB and were able to tow the broken platform to the safety of the RCYC.

We have not completed the forensic analysis of what went wrong. The Aethon
platform was subjected to several complete thrashings in the work up to
Newport and we were highly confident in it. The engineering was grounded on
actual loans taken from strain gauges bonded to the Cogito platform, and the
platform had been dry land tested to loads well above the loads recorded. So
either the beam was damaged in Newport or our understanding of the loads is
incorrect. Reviewing the tape of the capsize shows that could have damaged
the beam and that we should have retested the platform before sailing again.
I hope that in the next few days to get the local experts on fractured
carbon to examine the broken bits and give me an opinion. -- Scuttlebutt
Forum: http://forum.sailingscuttlebutt.com/cgi-bin/gforum.cgi?post=10563