Above: the ‘Vanguard Glue Pots’ prepare to lay up one of more than 30 Finns they will supply for the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984. Right: three-time 470 World Champion Dave Ullman pays close attention as the self-bailers go into his latest Vanguard in 1980 with high hopes that this is the 470 that will take him and Tom Linskey to gold at that year’s Olympic regatta in Tallinn, Estonia (page 47)
down on the ground and started talking to him, and slowly his ears went up…’ Peter also sailed a Tempest with Pete
Barrett, as well as the famous Vanguard Finns. And maybe it’s just because while we are talking at Eastern Yacht Club several world-class Star sailors have just sat down across the room from us, for their pre-race briefing, but he adds one regret: ‘I never got into the Star boat; kinda wish I had. ‘That hull design is as modern as you
can imagine; it’s pure elegance, and it’s survived for 100 years! There’s no other boat that has that kind of pedigree, and I don’t think a lot of guys really realise that.’ He never achieved the highest level in
soft water sailing, he admits. ‘I’d get to maybe seven-eighths good… and then the business would interfere. Because my first love was the business.’
More plastic balls Now that the Harken name dominates most sailboat hardware inventories it’s hard to understand how radical the 150 Cam Cleat seemed when it first joined the block line-up. ‘That’s a funny story,’ Peter says. ‘I don’t know what made me decide to
put ball bearings in a cam cleat. But in those days, in order to release a line that was under load, you had to pull back and then snap up.’ The fingers of his right hand curl around an imaginary mainsheet that he hauls toward himself, while simultaneously shaking his head – because the end goal was easing it out. Peter thought it would be so much better if you could release the line without unloading it first, and ‘I just had ball bearing stuck in my head. ‘A young engineer and I got together, and
I said, “Let’s design a cam cleat with ball bearings in it.”’ They eventually settled on three rows of 5/32in balls, but ‘this was all done empirically; we weren’t trying to engi- neer this stuff…’ Testing each prototype on
42 SEAHORSE
the iceboat? I suggest. ‘Yeah, we just shaped one after another. And, Jesus, the thing really worked great! Almost too easy – the line could flick out.’ Adding a slight angle to the cam’s teeth helped solve that. Another improvement ‘that was kind of
strange’ was changing the pivot point of the cam, so it didn’t line up exactly with the rotating point. ‘I still remember: 17° off-point. Anything over that or under that, it just didn’t work as well.’ All of these details played together,
Peter says. ‘And that damn cam cleat hasn’t changed since day one! That design is now 30-40 years old, and we still sell them by the hundreds of thousands. Even during the recession we were wondering: where are all these things going? There are no boats being built!’ He’s chuckling again. ‘They were being
used in all kinds of other applications, especially in the entertainment industry; raising curtains or changing scenery. So they were going all over the place.’ Other companies have tried to copy the
150, Peter says, and ‘there are a lot of good ones out there, but they didn’t do every- thing quite right. Without bragging, ours is still pretty much the main one. That thing is long-lived.’
Ferrari syndrome, and that little red line Peter’s next innovation was a recirculating ball traveller. ‘We weren’t the first; there was an English company making them, but with stainless balls that were chewing up the tracks. And of course we looked at it and said, “You need plastic balls!”’ Then came big boat blocks, because ‘guys started pressing us to do something there. ‘And then we got into the winch busi-
ness, with the Bassani brothers of Italy. They had a company called Barbarossa…’ his smile fades, remembering the clash of cultures. ‘The Italians, they can’t make
anything unless it looks like a Ferrari. We really liked their work and they were really good guys, and of course inside their build- ings everything is beautiful. But they never really worked a full eight-hour day. They didn’t have to!’ They were very wealthy, he explains,
adding under his breath as if that explained everything; ‘Six Meter sailors.’ They never said no, Peter continues, because ‘they didn’t like the word. They would just always agree to everything and then not do it. That, of course, was really against our principles. It was Northern Anglo-Saxon against Mediterranean… ‘I still describe it as the Ferrari syn-
drome,’ he says. ‘So what if the door handle doesn’t work – who cares? Jump over the door to get in the car, don’t spend your time trying to make a nice door handle! That was really a problem for sev- eral years, to change that culture: respond correctly, don’t lie. And they’ve done that.’ Another innovative product shows how
the two approaches finally meshed. ‘Lew- mar handles were going on our winches, and we didn’t like that because the yellow knob on top said Lewmar; everybody was mistak- ing our winches for Lewmar’s. So I said, “We’ve got to come up with a handle.” ‘We had an old-time designer who came
out of the Alfa Romeo transmission engi- neering lab; didn’t know anything about sailing, but he designed transmissions, which is basically what winches do. I used to love watching this guy work… no com- puters, he did everything by hand, with little brushes, pen and pencil. I gave him an elec- tronic caliper for Christmas one time – and he never used it! He could draw a 50mm line exactly, without measuring. ‘Anyway, I asked him to design a winch
handle, and I said, “You’ve got to make it look like a Ferrari.” And he did! He made it ergonomically good. And he put this twist of a little red line around the knob.
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