A keen sailor, member of Toronto Sailing and Canoe Club, Cassian asked if his skills might be of some use in Cuthbertson office.
However, with family in Toronto, Cassian was frequently home on weekends and often dropped into Cuthbertson's office to see how things were going.
Evidently things did not go all that well in Detroit, and after about a year, on one of Cassian's visits, he told Cuthbertson that he had decided to return home, was going to be married, and could he have his old job back.
He plays guitar, wears his black hair long, and has been known to step aboard someone’s yacht in a pretty noisy pair of bellbottoms.
[7] The same year, Canadian yachtsman Perry Connolly asked C&C to design a custom 40 ft (12 m) racing sloop for him.
Red Jacket is considered to be the first sailboat engineered with a cored hull (other earlier boats had balsa-cored decks, and powerboat builders were using it in transoms and superstructures).
No doubt the weight savings and panel stiffness of her cored hull contributed significantly to her racing success.
[1] In September 1969 the design firm of Cuthbertson & Cassian Ltd. joined with Belleville Marine Yard, Hinterhoeller Ltd. and Bruckmann Manufacturing to form C&C Yachts.
[9] The C&C designs that came off C&C's drawing board in the early 70s for production building at the Niagara-on-the-Lake plant of George Hinterhoeller included the C&C 25, 27, 30, 35, and 39.
He spent several years running the research and development (R&D) arm of the company, but financial constraints resulted in the management decision to curtail the R&D department and Cassian rejoined the design group.
George Cassian died of a heart attack on 10 April 1980, following a strenuous squash tournament at just 47 years of age.
He was gentle and sensitive, and his untimely passing is a grave loss...."[11]Cassian was survived by his wife and four children.