While Peter Harken may have hung up his ‘skates’ Honeybucket XIV races on in the hands of Harken director of engineering Steve Orlebeke who won the two biggest Skeeter trophies last winter. In the right conditions – ie on good ice – an E-Skeeter is easily capable of 100mph or more, hence the closed cockpit is a necessity rather than a luxury. Note how the mainsheet system, which is mighty on these boats, has been moved inside the rear cowl to reduce windage and prevent friction-inducing ice build-up


Wisconsin with ice and snow for half the year, and having the cold weather DNA of my Dutch father and Swedish mother and seeing all these great winter sports like skiing and iceboating I became enthralled. Of course my undisciplined mind broke


the swimming training rule and I was soon tackling the various winter and other outdoor sports like rock climbing and white water canoeing down wild ice-laden rapids (which was really stupid, by the way!). It didn’t take long before the coaches saw a change in my swimming and gave me the ‘either or’ deci- sion to make. After 11 years of constantly pounding up and down a pool and faced with having to give up these great newly discov- ered winter sports, I told the coaches ‘I’m done’. And of course I lost my scholarship without first discussing it with my father. Needless to say he got pretty angry, espe-


cially when I suggested that ‘maybe I need a break from school and should spend second semester learning to ski really well in Col- orado… which will of course be important to know about for survival if I’m ever caught out alone way up north and deep in snow country’. Either silence was the answer or I couldn’t hear the string of four-letter words and, as our call was over 10,000 miles with him in the Philippines, it ended with him simply saying, ‘you are right son and good luck!’ Click! My father, who’d managed to live


through nearly five years in a horrible Japanese prisoner of war camp in Indonesia during WWII and started our family over from zero after we lost everything, then gave Olaf and me a wonderful upbringing in the Philippines, he had a different sense of work ethic to his goof-off son and so he cut me off financially! Surprise, surprise! So now I had to find a job to live and make some money to get back to university and pursue my mediocre academic career to get a degree ASAP so I could get into the real world! So with $50 to my name, and lots of


peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for me and my dog, we trekked out to Aspen in my


44 SEAHORSE


1951 Chevy, drafting big trucks all the way to save gas. I spent the winter working and learning to ski well, having been sort of adopted by the US Ski Team who wanted to teach this 19-year-old ‘Flatlander from the snowless Philippines’ how to really ski using the black and blue method and finesse be damned! They strapped their used racing skis on me and black and blue I was, getting pounded every day. After my skiing stint in Colorado I came


back and found a job at Gilson Medical Electronics whose genius owner, Dr Gilson, liked sailing and put me to work in their engineering design and development depart- ment. Doc Gilson believed that ‘what you design, you make’ and that would ensure you work hard at simplicity! So, anyway, I had to learn how to use lathes, milling machines, drill presses and all sorts of manu- facturing equipment. In the meantime, I built my own-design International 14, had entirely rebuilt Flying Dutchman US 1, most of an E-scow with a radical deck and some iceboats; but as I was only earning basic living money I had to make all my own deck gear as I couldn’t afford to buy anything. But good old Doc Gilson let me use the shop after hours so I could work on my own stuff. My first handmade blocks had stainless


steel needle bearings rather than simpler journal bearings which was the norm back then, because in the midwest our summer winds are on the light side and our inland scows have big sailplans with multiple parts to be able to sheet the boom in heavier air. The problem with journal bearings was in light air because the multiple parts/blocks had too much friction to let the boom swing out without having to push it by hand, and that caused unnecessary motion in the boat and sails when you wanted to be still and quiet through the water. Iceboats also need lots of parts in their


mainsheet because the cold winter air has much more punch than warmer summer winds, plus the boats are going up to six times the speed of the wind and the loads on


the rig and sheet get really high. And the sheet release action must be almost instanta- neous or you will dump on your head so very friction-free blocks are necessary. In both cases I felt even the needle bearing blocks were not fast enough, but I didn’t have an answer. One of my work projects was to develop


a biomedical machine called a Fraction Collector that involved about 200 test tubes in a spiral on a round disc type turntable that had to index each tube under a pipette that would dispense a prescribed amount of liquid in each test tube; and the whole mechanism had to live in a highly acidic atmosphere inside a sort of refrigerator. I could not use normal ball bearings, even


stainless steel balls or any commercial bear- ings available back then in the 1960s and no lubricant of any type because zero contami- nation was a must! I needed a bearing mate- rial to withstand the acidic environment and run without lubricant so I thought ‘does anyone make plastic balls which would be resistant to the acid and self-lubricating?’ Plastic balls for bearing usage were not


prevalent in those days, but I finally found a company in New Jersey that made ¼in- diameter nylon balls and ordered several hundred of them. I machined a large-diameter race into the bottom of the turntable to house the balls. While assembling them into the race several balls rolled off the bench and hit the floor, but I noticed how high they bounced… One class at UW that I was decent in –


because it interested me – was physics and so in this thick cranium of a head a little light bulb flashed: ‘lighter weight, faster accelera- tion!’ The nylon balls were certainly much lighter than stainless balls or needle/roller bearings so I thought, why not in a block? But why is acceleration important in a


sailboat block? Because the sheaves roll back and forth while sheeting in and out, so it all stops/starts and the faster it can do that the quicker and easier the sheet and sail can be adjusted. So after I went home from work I sketched


w


GRETCHEN DORIAN


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