Clockwise from above: It was never going to be about ‘bring your kids to work days’. Peter Harken gets to know two or three new recruits during one of Harken’s now legendary bring (all) your dog(s) to work days – it is a rare time indeed at Harken that there are not at least a few dogs keeping things nice; Russell – now Sir Russell – Coutts doing his ‘thang’ at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, where after a nervous half-hour having his initially too heavy wet clothing re-weighed he took the gold medal in the Finn class – by this time Vanguard and Harken were the class’s official equipment supplier to the Games; while it is deck equipment that most now associate with the Harken name, Vanguard produced a prodigious range of well-built performance dinghies – the Vanguard Finn remains a favourite on the Classic Finn circuit; Vanguard Boat Transport Inc prepares to deliver a batch of new 420s… good times


much more free-rolling… And that’s when I thought, I wonder if somebody makes plastic balls… because they were not popular at all.’ He found a company that produced quarter-inch plastic spheres for Honeywell thermostats and promptly ordered 100, ‘which was nothing to them’. Then he machined a groove into an alu- minium plate and loaded the balls into it. ‘And, damn, they worked pretty well! But in the meantime… some of them rolled off my workbench and hit the cement floor next to me. And I saw that they really bounced high… ‘Now the only class I was any good at


was physics, because I enjoy it. And I looked at that, and I went – wow. Compared to a steel ball this is lightweight with faster acceleration. And that’s exactly what a sailboat pulley needs!’


46 SEAHORSE That evening Peter made a napkin


sketch. ‘The next day I made a couple of pulleys and blocks; pretty crude – but with plastic side plates, very much like the design today. I just made it for myself,’ he insists; ‘I wasn’t planning to go into business.’ But other iceboaters soon noticed that


Peter no longer had to push out his boom when he turned downwind – and then asked for their own. ‘I was hand-making these things!’ he remembers, shaking his head. ‘And I didn’t have the heart to charge for labour costs…’ When Dr Gilson offered him ‘a really


good position’ he decided to focus instead on his own projects. ‘I damn near took it. But finally I said, “Doc, I love working at your shop. The trouble is I love this other stuff even more. So I better not do it.” To this day I don’t know why I didn’t take it! I


could have been number two at the com- pany… But then I started my own thing.’ Around the same time Olaf also turned


down an attractive job offer and moved to Wisconsin to help Peter build boats. ‘Why I made that decision then I’ll never know,’ Olaf said in the company history, which describes the first Vanguard offices as a rundown garage. (In other interviews Peter has claimed that Olaf came to Wisconsin ‘because the parties are better’.) ‘He became the brains of the business,’


Peter tells me now. ‘We always interfered with each other; like brothers, we fought like hell, bashing each other good. And it really worked out.’ In part two: how Olympic visibility plus an accidental marketing push propelled those prototype blocks to unexpected stardom


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