Honeybucket XIV is the last Skeeter built by Bill Mattison and is seen here being started by Harken senior engineer Steve Orlebeke. By now aero – as well as driver safety – dominated Skeeter design, along with runner development. The matching of blade and ice involves a level of voodoo comparable only with the mysteries of ‘tuning’ a go-kart chassis, tube flex providing the only suspension
in the Finn, by explaining to Barrett how to optimise the shape of a Games-provided rough-cut wood mast. ‘And you know what, he never charged
anyone for his labour!’ Peter Harken tells me. ‘He was such a generous guy. All the ice- boaters in Madison, anybody who owned a Scow, or anything that needed work or a repair on it, Bill would just say, “Bring it around to the Willy Street Boat Shop, and we’ll get her sailing the next day.” ‘And he always did, no matter what the
damage was. And people always offered to pay for it, but he just wouldn’t take any money. His most famous saying was “It’s good for the sport.” That’s just what he did.’ Harken was sailing a much smaller ice-
boat than Bill when the two first met at a regatta. ‘I kept looking at the Skeeters and drooling,’ Peter remembers; ‘we call them the Ferraris of the ice. And Bill came up and said, “I think you should take mine for a ride.” I said, “No, I can’t. I mean, this is your boat, and I don’t want anything to happen to it.” He says, “Oh that’s OK. If you roll it or crash it, it’s your boat!” ‘It was a thrill and a half,’ Peter contin-
ues, chuckling. ‘After I came in I just looked at him and said, “That’s it. I’m gonna get into a Skeeter somehow.” And he said, “Well, you better show up tomor- row morning at the Boat Shop, and start building a boat.”‘ When Harken did show up, ‘The first
thing that Bill and his partner Paul Krueger did was hand me a broom and a shovel to “clean up this damn place”. And it was pretty messy because they open-ground
40 SEAHORSE
everything. Health and safety… ha!! ‘So I spent that whole afternoon and
evening just cleaning up. And then Bill told me, “Well, you got to come back tomorrow and then we’ll get you going [on boatbuild- ing]. But if you haven’t finished this you may have to continue until it’s done.” And they were laughing! I just knew this was the beginning of something… So I picked up the broom again. Finally they started letting me in on some of the building stuff. And, boy, it was almost 30 years of that.’ Four or five nights a week Harken
would make the 45-minute drive up to Madison after working all day in Pewaukee. Bill and Paul would already be there, since their day jobs were right nearby. ‘In the shop it was just non-stop, sawing or planing wood, or fibreglassing or carbon fibre, vacuum-bagging. Just bloody continuous, three of us on the job non-stop. ‘I’d stay there till about 10.30 or 11
o’clock at night and then I’d drive home, full of carbon and fibreglass; my girlfriend didn’t really appreciate that! Or I’d stay at Bill’s house. We’d be all black from carbon fibre and this and that. I think at times Bill just went to bed like that; actually we all did!’ Iceboat hulls are extremely long and
narrow, he reminds me. ‘If we were work- ing on a mould or the fuselage Paul and I would be at one end, applying resin to the cloth – not pouring it, being very careful with rollers, because Bill didn’t want one extra drop of resin that didn’t need to be there. He would be at the other end with a pot of hot resin, yelling “Make way, make way, too hot!”’ He pauses for another
chuckle. ‘It was fun, I’ll tell you that. But it wasn’t slow – it was non-stop.’ Linda Lindquist first met Bill in 1995
when they were both working for Bill Koch’s America3
Women’s America’s Cup
Team. She stayed in touch with him after- wards because ‘his mind was so truly extraordinary. I’ll never forget visiting the shop and Bill would be covered in carbon dust, surrounded by drums of resin, watching the Green Bay Packers and drinking beer while tweaking and building the fastest iceboats in the world.’ When I ask Peter Harken what beer
they preferred he says most of their drink- ing was done in a dive bar next door to the Willy Street shop (which also had ‘excel- lent hamburgers’). ‘But that was only ever once we were done,’ he insists. ‘Bill didn’t have any rules like, “Hey,
you can’t drink while we’re working on this.” It was just clearly understood.’ Then he carefully differentiates between
the laminating evenings when it was just him, Paul and Bill, ‘because we knew how to roll out glass and spread resin without putting too much on’, and the many mem- orable evenings and weekends when a pro- ject required more hands to glue up an ice- boat mast or plank. ‘Guys would always volunteer to help laminating a mast, or a big [iceboat] plank out of Sitka spruce. ‘They must have had 500 big clamps in
that shop, and the clamps were only 1ft apart! You had to glue it up quickly. ‘Linda may have been very right that the
secondary help would have a beer during a break, or while waiting to be told what to
GRETCHEN DORIAN
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