Left: out of the mayhem of an early Harken Christmas party came this (above) – complete dominance of the America’s Cup market for winches, deck gear and increasingly hydraulic systems. It was back in 1993 that Team New Zealand CEO Peter Blake had asked Peter Harken, ‘Can you guarantee that your (first) America’s Cup winches will be successful?’ ‘We can’t guarantee anything’, said Harken, ‘other than that we’ll work our butts off around-the-clock to keep you sailing.’ ‘Good enough’ said the lanky New Zealander
has enough power or punch compared to hydraulic fluid power. Air’s too compress- ible and you have to carry really powerful air pumps that are just too big and heavy. And then the hoses too, they all have to be bigger. It’s got a weight problem, the size of the engines and everything you need com- pared to hydraulic pumps to deliver the equivalent power output. As far as, say, driving winches or anything like that, right now I don’t think so. I think the equipment involved is going to be basically too heavy. SH: I know you’re always interested in getting and keeping kids sailing… PH: That’s been the biggest question for I don’t know how many years – how do you make sailing grow? All kinds of world sail- ing organisations… ISAF, Sailing World, or is it World Sailing??? Every six months they get a new name (laughter). They’ve all come up through the years with all kinds of so-called ideas that never seem to really get off the ground. I think constantly shifting demographics
throughout the world make it too big a problem to solve as a whole. All we can do is concentrate on trying to come up with ideas within our own community to make sailing more popular, then try to spread that concept elsewhere if it’s successful. Strong class organisations that really work
at making sailing a fun sport for the family with great social events are the key! Our Inland Lakes Yachting Association (ILYA) with its family-crewed scow fleets, fun regattas and good junior programmes is a case in point. That and great parties! Our philosophy in trying to make sail-
ing grow is simplifying it, making it just plain easier. Sailing has a learning curve to it. People nowadays don’t spend the time at it or have the time they did. Seems like they’re more oriented towards family. The kids want to do something more exciting than sit in a sailboat all day long. Weekend racing is dropping because it
takes all day to go out there and race one or two races. It’s either the long sail to get to the course or you have a big boat and you’ve got to have crew so you bring your kids and stuff with you. But they don’t want to spend every weekend doing that. So weekend racing where you spend all weekend at it is going down quite a bit. The most popular racing now is the beer
can stuff on Wednesday evenings and not on a weekend. The race is only an hour and a half or so. Then they come in and they have a big barbecue at the yacht club and things like that, and it’s a quick family affair and then the people are off doing something else on the weekend.
SH: But how to keep more people engaged right through their lives… PH:We find getting kids into sailing is not a problem, as long as it’s fun. Programmes like the O’Pen BICs are really growing and the Oppis are still strong. That part is pretty good. And all the way into high school, now we have a big high school sailing programme at our yacht club in Pewaukee. So that area is OK. The problem is when they have finished
schooling, enter the real world and have a young family. Usually both husband and wife are working. They maybe have a couple of young kids and they can’t spend a lot of time out, they can’t afford an expen- sive raceboat plus then spend money on it – and they don’t want to. We get them back, they start coming back I would say after about 35. Now they’re better off and they maybe get into a sportboat, then maybe they’ll go into more of a cruiser-racer. After 40, yeah, you get them back but they’re all going to be in bigger boats! SH: And Harken’s place in all this? PH: I think the only thing we can do is just make the handling of the boat and the learning curve quicker, make it easier with the equipment. Our gear is the interface between the human being and the boat that allows them to control things. So it’s our
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