Sailing Stories: Peter Harken

Peter Harken needs little introduction in the world of sailing. With his brother, Olaf, he started a shoestring business building collegiate and Olympic class dinghies (Vanguard Boats) in Wisconsin in 1968, which evolved into Harken Yacht Equipment after Peter created a new type of ball bearing block that changed the game when it came to trimming.

The rest is sailing industry history. Today, Harken Inc.’s wide range of deck hardware, hydraulics, vangs, winches, furling systems, blocks, and gear is found on boats all over the world, from club racers to the Olympic classes and IMOCAs, from cruising sailors to the America’s Cup and superyachts. The company headquarters in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, occupies a 175,000-square-foot building with a massive manufacturing floor where raw materials become finished products. Winches are built in another plant in Italy, and the company has divisions in the UK, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, and Poland.

In 2020, Peter announced that he and Olaf, who had died the year before, had chosen to sell their shares to their employees and transition the business to an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan). “It’s well time to pass the baton to those who actually do the work,” he said announcing the decision. “Oh yeah, I’m an employee now, I have to come in on time!” He maintains an office and is rarely not in house, especially on the manufacturing floor, where he remains engaged in and fascinated by the latest technology and processes.

In December 2023, I visited Pewaukee, and Peter was among about 16 Harken employees who introduced themselves to some two dozen marine rigging professionals attending Harken University (“Continuing Education” March 2023).

“I think I’ve been here way too long,” he joked with his ready sense of humor. But then he shifted. “The philosophy of this company has been to let our people run, and always hire smarter than you are,” he said. “Every single person you just met is an owner, and we have a vested interest in making sure you’re successful.”

Later that day, everyone gathered in the two-story atrium lobby, where the company’s history surrounds the visitor in a visual timeline of floor-to-ceiling photos along the curved walls, the iconic Pepsi machine that long ago was converted to deliver ice cold beers still does its job, and a Vanguard Finn and Volant, fully rigged, occupy center stage. The occasion was to honor a soon-to-be retiring employee, Mark Pares, who had been with the company for 47 years, and Peter held everyone in the palm of his hand sharing stories. Mark chimed in with hilarious tales of hijinks from the early days (including an in-house band with the iconic name Big Stink and the Smell), and at the end he pointed to Peter and, with tears in his eyes said, “Best boss ever.”

Peter and I finally found time for a long chinwag over the phone a few weeks later. Following are excerpts from that chat, during which he touched on topics including growing up during wartime, organically developing a business one step at a time, the stupidest sailing there is, what kind of boats he’d sail if he were just starting out today, and the importance of fun.

Life During Wartime

Peter started by talking about an imminent trip to Indonesia, where he and Olaf grew up during World War II with their Dutch father and Swedish mother.

WMC: When was the last time you were there?

PH: When the Japanese were dropping bombs on our house and garage…Thankfully, they missed the house. They did get the garage though. But we were all sitting under the dining room table, I can still remember, with a pencil in my mouth, cotton in our ears to absorb the concussions…we all sat under there during the bombing runs and stuff.

I was born in Surabaya, Java, and my father worked for Caterpillar…He helped us escape to the east side of Borneo, because the Japanese had already taken the west side, come down the Malay peninsula. And then they hit northern Sumatra, Medan, where we were. We made our way to eastern Borneo, and then from there we got on a type of troopship with other refugees to New Zealand, Wellington, and we were there for a year. And then we got on a troopship to Melbourne, Australia, and we were there until 1944, and then we got on an American troopship with wounded soldiers, refugees, and everything like that, from Melbourne to San Francisco. And then we spent the rest of the war years until he got released in the Santa Cruz area.

WMC: And how old were you when all this was going on?

PH: Well, I was born in ’37, so that was back in 1941, ’42. I was about 5 years old, 6 years old, and then the end of the war I was about 8 years or 9 years old, somewhere there. So I remember it very well. You remember dramatic events really well, you know, even as a kid.

WMC: Your dad was a prisoner of war for five years, right?

PH: Yes. He stayed behind and helped fight with the small Dutch army. And then he got captured and he was put in a prison camp for five years. Pretty brutal camp. But he made it through. He was the last living survivor of his camp, but he was a pretty tough guy. So, yeah, we were lucky that way. And my mother really never knew what happened to him, but she kept our hopes alive the whole damned time, you know? So it all worked out. Finally, we got reunited in San Francisco in 1946. Took about a year to find him and get us together, you know, with the war ended in August, I believe, of 1945. And then it took almost a year.

After being reunited, the family moved to Caterpillar headquarters in Peoria, Illinois, then to Larchmont, New York, until 1948 when they returned to Manila to help rebuild the city.

Manila was very flattened when we came. And I’ve never quite understood how my father and my mother went right back into a war zone. But they did it. And, as a kid, you don’t really give a damn what the architecture is like, whether the building’s falling down or not or what it looks like. You’re just looking for good times and stuff.

So we had a great life in the Philippines. It was really good. There was an American school run by Americans with Filipinos and Europeans. It was an international school, and that’s where we went to school until we graduated in 1955. Just Olaf and I. He was two years younger than me.

I got a swimming scholarship to go to UW Madison and Olaf two years later went to Georgia Tech on a swimming scholarship also.

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College Life

I’d never lived in the land of ice and snow, except for the very short stint in New York. But my mother is Swedish and my father is Dutch, so they certainly got cold weather DNA, and the sports. And when I got to Wisconsin it was colder than hell, but I got to liking it a lot…it was in me. So I started looking into skiing and iceboating and all that stuff I shouldn’t have been doing, because in swimming they don’t want you to do anything else—nothing, because you start tightening up and your muscles are different and everything. But I was cheating on the side because I really like the winter sports.

His coach finally told him he had to make up his mind, and Peter did. He quit swimming and lost his scholarship.

That’s when I called my dad in the Philippines. And here I am trying to bullshit a guy who’s been in a prison camp for five years, you know, during the war…on why it’s important for me to go learn to ski in Colorado to really get into the cold weather because someday I might be caught up in northern Canada or Alaska or somewhere, you know, in deep snow and ice. And I’m going to learn to survive. And I’m just rattling on and on, on the phone, 10,000 miles away. And he didn’t say a damn word. He just sat there and said, “Yeah, OK, I understand. And by the way, son, good luck.” Click. He just cut me right off. And he cut the checkbook off also (laughs).

So I loaded up the car with my old rotten skis. It was it was the 1951 Chevy convertible. And I had to keep the top down because I didn’t have any place to put the skis so that they just went into the backseat and up into the forward seat. And with my dog and 50 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, we took off for Aspen. I tailgated big trucks all the way out there to save gas. By the time we arrived in Aspen, my dog had 6 inches of snow on his head and we were sleeping in a sleeping bag in the car.

After a fun winter ski bumming and delivering newspapers in Aspen, Peter says he realized it wasn’t a future and returned to school in Wisconsin. There he started building his own boats for racing. He and a friend bought an E Scow bare hull and built it up from there.

The boat was quite different from all the other E Scows. We made it very much dinghy-like, you know, rolling cockpits and hiking out instead of laying on the the rails and long tillers and everything, and it was a helluva good boat, but we were dumb. I can still remember at a regatta in Madison, Buddy Melges walking over and saying, “You know, you guys, if you guys knew how to sail, you’d have this regatta down pat.” He was great. And that’s where I met Buddy. And then I met him also on the ice [iceboating].

Peter also joined the university’s Hoofer Sailing Club.

We had a really good sailing team and so that’s where I believe I spent 90% of my academic career. I think maybe I studied 10% of the time and my grades sure showed it.

The Ball Bearings

To fund his return to school, Peter started working part-time for Gilson Medical Electronics. As part of one project, he needed special bearings, and so he sourced quarter-inch white balls from a company in New Jersey.

I had them on my workbench, a bunch of them, and several of them rolled off the workbench and hit the floor next to me. And they bounced very high. And I went, Jesus! Lightweight, fast response. The only thing I was good at in school was physics. And so, I looked at that and I went, whoa, wait a second. This is exactly what a sailboat block needs because it starts and goes backwards. It doesn’t keep rotating…And of course, in our smaller one-design type boats, the scows and the iceboats, we needed blocks that reacted very fast. They were light. And so we were always searching for that. I went home with the idea in my head and made some sketches and came back the next day at work and made some blocks. And then I started using them on my own boat. I wasn’t planning to to sell them or make them for anyone, I just wanted some for my iceboat. And they really worked. And like you say, other sailors noted this and wondered what the hell I had there. And I showed them, and then they asked, could you make me some? And I said, yes. And of course I underpriced them like hell. And then I made some for the other guys, and then more guys wanted them.

Eventually, he built blocks for Peter Barrett and Lowell North sailing in the Star class in the 1968 Olympics, as well as Buddy Friedrichs in the Dragon class.

They both won gold medals. And then the Europeans started coming over and looking at them and wondering what the heck we had there. What were these black blocks with these white balls in them? That sort of started the whole thing, you know, when the word started getting around. Then it kind of grew from there.

Olaf had returned from a job in New York to help Peter build boats as Vanguard. “Why I made that decision then, I’ll never know,” Olaf says in a history on the company’s website.

We were building the MIT-type dinghy...and then we went into the Flying Junior, which was also a collegiate boat. And then we heard that in the Olympics, they were looking for a new two-man dinghy. The IYRU in England was looking at the 470 or the Fireball, which was built in England, and the Strale, and so it was a contest between those three boats, and Olaf and I kind of looked at it all and said, “We need to get into another boat.” And we looked at the three designs and we just decided that the 470’s shape and everything was going to be more light for the Americans than the other two. And thankfully we were right. They did choose the 470. We did get into building those and quite a few of them, a couple of thousand, I think.

By 1986, Peter and Olaf decided to concentrate the business solely on gear, selling the Vanguard boatbuilding part of the company.

WMC: When this thing started, did you ever have any notion at all of where it was really going to go?

PH: None. We had no notion. We really didn’t plan that thing. We were kind of working from day to day, you know, we called it one foot at a time, and we were just too busy to really sit down and think of a long-range plan or anything like that. Just kept plodding along and it just grew, each step grew a little bit, and there we are. I mean, we’ve been at this for a long time. You know, there was there was no real future plan in it. It just developed.

The Transition to an ESOP

We kept getting hit by private equity firms and outside companies to buy the company. And we just weren’t ready for it. And we had a constant worry in all of it about who’s going to take care of the employees when the shit hits the fan, so to speak, like a like a recession or a COVID or any kind of disaster, you know, where you were going to be in tough economic times for a while. Because we did know that in most cases, the bosses or the owners of these companies took care of themselves before the employees. And we had totally the opposite. We always took care of the employees. They were friends of ours, their families were friends, and the whole thing. We went into several downturns, and Olaf and I and a couple of the top guys, we wouldn’t take any salary or anything. We kept the employees…their basic pay and medical benefits.

So that worry was in us at every meeting. And we always used to ask these other firms, OK, if this happens and that happens, you know, a downturn—because the downturns are going to happen, you’re not going to live forever in the good times. We said, what do you do? What do you do with your employees? What do you do with yourselves and so on? How do you behave? And I never could get a straight answer...It was always hemming and hawing around. So we just were never comfortable with it. And finally, we said, look, let’s not do this. Let’s go with the ESOP. We’re going to have much happier employees…And, you know, we’re just going to go on like we always have, which is what’s happened. It’s working like a dream. God, we were so damn lucky, you know. And the company’s booming. I was just downstairs looking at all the new huge machinery coming in, computer-controlled big, big CMC machines coming in. One of them’s as big as a Greyhound bus. It’s amazing. I love them, they’re something else.

WMC: In terms of the company that you all built, what are you most proud of in terms of that part of your life?

PH: Well, I’d say I’m proud of that. We have happy employees and they’re growing…I see we have a happy company and that’s really important. I go to bed at night and I go to sleep. I have no worries. They’re smarter than me. They’re doing greater than I am. And what could be better? I mean, the amount of dollars is not that important. And it’s much slower coming than if I sold it outright. But, you know, what are you going to do with several million in your pocket all of a sudden? So it’s fine. Everything is good, you know, enough is enough.

WMC: When you’re looking at what they’re doing, what’s the most exciting thing that you’re seeing happening at this point there? What excites you the most?

PH: The big machines that are coming in. I’ve been down there every day going through them, so I’m down there a lot. I won’t be able to run them. They’re beyond me. But I’ll be there anyway watching them. My biggest interest in being able to come here and everything is truly in the machine shop area. Because that’s where all the development is being done, I mean, we’re making stuff now that you wouldn’t recognize would go on a sailboat at all. You know, these special little hydraulic valves and all that now is GP racing and the America’s Cup boats and all of that.

WMC: How has sailing changed in ways that you that you didn’t expect?

PH: Well, I would say that I didn’t expect this fast a transformation to the foiling boats. I knew the foiler was coming on. I mean, we we built foilers for windsurfers many years ago. But it finally fell through because it was too difficult for the normal person. We didn’t have the bow control and stern controls or any of that…We had to depend on pulling the sail in and out really fast, and we just weren’t fast enough in most cases. I called it the 100-yard dash, and then splash, then get up and do it again.

But when the foiling sensation really started and the advancement in foiling came about, that was much faster than I thought, and kind of was surprised in a way, with the technology on it and the equipment that’s used now, besides just the carbon fiber foils and so on. And even that’s advanced a hell of a lot.

WMC: Do you think if you were just getting into sailing today, that’s where your interest would lie? I mean, when you were, you know, even in the beginning with iceboats, those are pretty techy, crazy fast boats, right?

PH: Yeah. Well, you know, you can’t stop technology. And, yeah, that’s what I would do if I was starting over. I would get into the foiling and do it. And in our iceboats, we were continuously working on them, shaping our blades and making changes in the sheeting and in the building, too, of the boats, going to carbon fiber vacuum molding and all of that. So we were continuously working on them, God, I worked on them for 35 years, spent much more time working on the boat than I did sailing it. It’s the stupidest sport. I mean, it’s awful. You spend 99% of your time or at least 95% or more of your time working on the boat, changing it or building a new one or whatever, and then you get maybe 5% of the time under the sail somewhere, and you always have to drive a couple of hundred miles to get to good ice or whatever. And then you get there, and there’s no wind, or there’s too much wind, or it’s too cold, or something like that. The only trouble is, when you do get to do it, it gets gets into your blood and then you wipe out all the pain and you do it all over again…if you really had any brains, you’d learn to stop a lot earlier.

Peter and his wife, Edit, bought a 55-foot expedition powerboat a few years ago for cruising, though he still sails on big boats at times for commissioning work, and what’s happening in the sport is always front and center through the work of the company.

WMC: There’s no question that obviously you and your brother and others worked extremely hard to build this company. But it also seems clear that you had a ton of fun doing it. And I guess my question is, how important is that? How important is fun? How important is joy, in a difficult, competitive business and sport?

PH: I think it’s just super important, because you’ve got to keep the hopes up, and you’ve got to create an atmosphere where people are happy and joke around and so on…So I think it’s extremely important. And that’s something that’s part of our culture, and that’s the culture we really wanted to keep.  

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April 2024