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Sep 23, 2010, 12:32 PM
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C-Class Aethon crumbles in Toronto
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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.
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