[ccriders]

I've had several years experience with carbon fiber as used in bicycles. The repair, maintenance and face to face with customers experience, as opposed to design and manufacture experience. From that experience I believe that carbon fiber masts and booms can be designed and manufactured so as to have a virtually infinite fatigue life, could greatly reduce weight, increase strength and allow more sophisticated airfoil shaping. the only real issues for a sailboat will be the manner in which attachments are made to the spar. Galvanic corrosion will be horrid unless meticulously addressed at every stage of design, manufacture and installation. Penetrating the carbon structure will corrupt its integrity unless done exactly right. Attachments merely bonded to the surface will release and attachments that penetrate the carbon will introduce galvanic corrosion and other damage to the structure.
The bike industry did some fatigue testing on handle bars; light weight aluminum bars, carbon reinforced aluminim bars and all carbon fiber bars. The bars were fixed at the center and cyclically loaded at the ends. The aluminum bars failed quite rapidly (17,000 cycles as I recall), the carbon/aluminum bars lasted about 10 times as long and the all carbon bars showed no signs of fatigue stress after several hundred million cycles. The testers then tried to see what it would take to break the carbon bars by accellerating the load in free fall for about 25 feet then stopping the center of the bars on an immovable object, the crash test in other words. It took several iterations to break the bars.

Carbon fiber is remarkable stuff and would make great spars for racers and cruisers who have a much bigger pocket book than I.