Left: Peter and Olaf Harken in the late 1980s with a photo of one of the fleet of Vanguard Finns that they supplied for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and (below) Peter doing that ‘arm in the side tank thing’ as he fits out a Vanguard 470. In this iceboat shot (below left) a chilly Pete Barrett (second left) is just back from racing a Finn in the sun at the 1960 Olympics; he will go on to win a Finn silver medal in 1964 and four years later a gold medal in the Stars with Lowell North


on a napkin after dinner ¼in grooved races on either side of a 1¼in-diameter sheave so the balls acted both radially and in thrust against the sideplates of the block. The next day after work I machined up a block with that bearing design and because it reacted as I had hoped I made several more over the next few days and put them on an iceboat, as it was winter, and later on my E-scow when hard water turned to soft water. In both cases they acted faster and easier than any other type of block and by quite a bit. At the time I was only making them for


my own boats, but my competitors saw how quiet and still our boat was in light air, never having to push the boom out, and the ease of fast sheeting in my iceboat… so they asked if I would make some for them; which I did and lost money on every one because I did not charge for my time which of course is always a lot longer than you predict on any project you do yourself. I used to guess one hour and the reality was three and of course it’s really a lot worse even than that. One of our major breakthroughs was the


1968 Olympics in Acapulco when Pete Barrett and Lowell North in the Star and Buddy Friedrichs in the Dragon won gold with the blocks I made for them. That brought the Europeans around to look at these strange black blocks with white balls in them – and the rest is history! SH:And then? PH: So we started getting orders and that was the impetus for the start of the company in terms of hardware. (We were also soon building boats as well – 470s, Finn, 420 and


46 SEAHORSE


Optimist – under the name Vanguard. But by 1986 it was getting too much to do both the boatbuilding and the hardware, and the hardware was climbing faster so we sold the boat company to Steve Clark and Chip John in Rhode Island and it still exists today.) That ball bearing block was in many


ways the impetus for whatever happened after that. To be honest, people thought we were going ball bearing crazy at that time because the next thing we brought out that really made a difference was our cam cleats with three rows of balls in them. That one was hard to get going in the beginning because people thought, ‘Now you guys are going too far. You’re just putting ball bear- ings on anything and trying to ride on the wave, and making cam cleats with balls – that’s ridiculous, you’re going too far.’ Well, there was a real reason for it. Up to


then, with all the cam cleats, when the line was loaded you still had to pull it back and down to get the line into the cleat. But, because of a certain geometry in the cams with the balls, you were able now to hold the line fully loaded and then just put it down and into the cam with no more pulling. Which was really important in the racing sailboats because the guy will always pull in and then try to slap it down into the cleat, which did not work before. Funnily enough, we have a lot of copies of


that cam around the world and I don’t know why but ours is one of the more expensive ones and it still sells like heck. I think it just has that extra little correct geometry that makes it work the way the guys want.


SH:And travellers? PH: That was our third big break. I won’t take credit for our first traveller, though – Ian Proctor was the guy who initially came up with a recirculating traveller car. He used stainless steel balls but they were a bit rough on the track – they worked OK, but they’d chew up the track. All we decided to do was make a recirculating car but put our plastic balls into it, which was much kinder to the aluminium tracks and again delivered a quicker response. From that the Battcar mainsail track system was also born, with the recirculating balls. I think it was fairly significant; before that there were all kinds of mast sliders and so on, but to reduce sail you had to get the pressure off those cars and to do that you had to go into the wind because there’s too much friction going on with the sail pushing against the car. SH:Your first customer? PH:Our first caller was Mike Birch on his big Formula Tag cat. I remember it well: he was going to do the transatlantic from Montreal to St Malo, and he came to us with this big reefing problem – everything was big on that boat. So we thought, well, why don’t we just take our traveller car and put the track on the mast with a fitting to take a batten receptacle. That’s basically what we did. Mike was able to sail the boat by himself and reduce sail without having to go into the wind. That was a very big deal for those guys. Actually it was a safety thing, enabling


you to reduce sail much more easily. It’s standard now of course, basically a trickle- down from other equipment that’s turned into a necessity in the sailing world. Whether it’s our company or somebody else, we’re all making friction-free cars. As so often for us one piece of equipment


led into another. We hadn’t pre-thought it. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh man, I just invented this.’ It came from a request: ‘Hey, guys, is there something you can do about this?’ In fact, a lot of what we do in the


company is exactly that: people come with a request that hasn’t been done before, or something they’ve had problems with, and they say, ‘Can you do this sort of thing?’ Then our engineering guys, either in Italy or the US, sit on their own and scratch their heads and sooner or later they solve the problem. Fortunately we have such great people who can think out of the box. We’ve had our successes but we’ve had


some spectacular failures also (laughter). We call that area the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. They’re lined up there… Next month – bigger toys. Peter Harken was talking to the editor q


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