Left: Olaf and Peter Harken with an early version of what soon became the ubiquitous Harken Titanium runner block… which by the mid-1980s was found on every serious racing yacht in the world, before then similarly invading the 12 Metre fleet at Fremantle for the 1987 America’s Cup. Olaf would sadly pass away in 2019 at the age of 80 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. First boats then blocks then both (above) as Peter fits out another Vanguard 470 with the latest Harken fittings. Previously, less than four years after their disappointingly slow launch in 1969, Harken ball-bearing blocks would be found on 34 of the boats at the 1972 Olympics in Kiel
and he’d go up there and sit right next to the lecturer. He was an amazing dog; he never had a leash on him.’ Such a carefree college existence – but
with one big problem: the swimming coach didn’t allow athletes to do any other sports, ‘because your muscles start to tighten up and you’re supposed to be com- pletely loosey-goosey. Ping pong maybe, but that’s it.’ By sophomore year it was clear that
Peter’s passions lay beyond the pool. ‘The coach told me to make up my mind; either truly change or else drop out. So I tried to change for about two weeks, but now I really was interested in sailing – especially iceboating. And skiing… obviously.’ Dropping out meant losing his scholar-
ship. Peter called his dad – who’d survived five years in a Japanese prison camp during WWII. ‘And here’s his bum of a son trying to tell this prisoner of war how I should learn to survive in the cold… by going to Aspen, and really learning how to ski well! ‘I was pretty decent at that time, but not
great.’ Peter pauses, mimes holding a phone to his ear. ‘I didn’t hear a peep on the other end of the phone. Finally he said, “Son, I totally agree. Got anything else to say?” I had a bad feeling in my stomach, so I said no. And he said, “Well, I think you should do exactly what you plan to do. And good luck. If you ever decide to go back to school and you start doing well with something I
might loan you some money. But don’t count on it. And it will be a loan; you’ll have to pay it back!” So the cheques stopped coming, and that was that.’ After making ‘50 peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches’ Peter and Mac drove out to Colorado in a 1951 Chevy convertible. ‘No ski racks or anything, so we piled the skis in the back with the top down. Mac loved it; he had six inches of snow on his head! That dog went with me everywhere; he’d run up to the top of Aspen just so he could see me, and then run all the way down again. The guys operating the chair- lift kept saying, “You’re gonna kill that dog. He’s exhausted.” So finally they let me take him up on the chair – the only one allowed. He was a fantastic dog.’ But by the end of that season Peter says
he ‘kind of woke up’ and decided to go back to school; life as a ski-bum ‘didn’t look like a good longterm programme’.
Boatbuilding Back at UW, Peter (and Mac) switched majors from engineering to international economics. (‘It was a faster way to get out of school and get on with real life,’ he claimed on Harken’s ‘our story’ page.) He also continued to prioritise hard and soft- water sailing. ‘I don’t know how many boats I built while I was going through school; two or three maybe.’ He rebuilt a wooden E-Scow, and rescued Flying
Dutchman #1 from a junkyard… ‘I was looking for some parts for my car
and saw this hull upside down and said, “My God, that’s a Flying Dutchman!” It was kind of a wreck…’ He and a buddy paid 50 bucks for it and then ‘resurrected it during the summer and made it really work, mainly because we had a 505 at the club that had nothing to sail against’. By this time he was Commodore of the
Hoofer Sailing Club, a student-run organi- sation with a fleet of old Tech dinghies. ‘We had to buy the boats ourselves in those days; the university didn’t back us financially.’ That highlighted a need for low-maintenance craft – which preferably wouldn’t sink when they capsized. ‘So I decided I’d make a better boat.’ The goal was equipment that would be
hard to damage, but ‘that didn’t mean making stuff really heavy; it was just figur- ing out where the weak spots were, and improving those. The MIT Tech dinghy was a hell of a good training boat, but once you turned that thing over it was just a big open bathtub. So I put a rolled rail deck on, and built a Tech which we called the Badger.’ The University of Wisconsin is still building them today, he says: ‘So it worked pretty decent.’ And in the winter Peter Harken went
iceboating. ‘I just got infatuated with it.’ The school had a ‘rickety old wooden stern-steerer’, a class Peter calls ‘the
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