Cracks in the starboard bow are likely to yield insight into the port bow separation.

DARTMOUTH, UK — The crew of the stricken catamaran Team Philips continues to investigate the reason a 45-foot section of the port bow broke away in moderate sea conditions and 30 knots of wind. The preceeding night, the 120-foot-long craft had reported 16.8 knots of speed under bare, twin 140-foot masts. At the time of the break up, the boat had three reefs in each mainsail as part of the policy of gently exploring the boat's limits. Suddenly, according to crewmember Mike Calvin who was on deck at the time of an otherwise ordinary watch "something designed to take a 70 ton shock-load crumpled like a plastic picnic basket."
"We talk glibly about adventure these days," Goss said as his team continues to examine what went wrong and concentrates on rebounding from the event, "but this is a true adventure." Certainly weighing in the minds of crew members is the fact that if the port hull had imploded six weeks later, when the boat would have been in the Southern Ocean on an attempt to break the Jules Verne record, Dartmouth might have been staging a memorial service rather than a homecoming. In such rough seas the boat would have nose-dived with such force that the safety straps protecting crew members on deck would probably have snapped, throwing them into freezing seas. Those sleeping below deck would have been instantly submerged. Tired and disoriented, they would have had to swim toward the emergency lights on the doorways. Had they got through, they would have had to struggle toward the remnants of the upturned hulls and their prognosis for survival would not have been good.
Designer Adrian Thompson has begun an inch by inch analysis of the boat to pinpoint what happened using a laser shearography system developed by NASA. Although he has no instant answers to the problem, a crack in the starboard hull is likely to hold important clues as to exactly what happened. A solution should be found within two weeks and repair work is expected to take three months.