Eugene Tekatch is not a man to balk at a challenge. Not even when the weather turns foul and the sailing gets rough. “Perseverance is the biggest thing that determines success,” says the former Mohawk College student and teacher. “I think life is a lot like going sailing. You can’t choose whether there’s good or bad weather. You have to set your eye on the goal and just keep going.” 
 

Not bad advice from someone who not only holds a world record for sailing across the Atlantic in a 35-foot trimaran, but also worked 100-hour weeks to put himself through school and built a successful company. Tekatch—known as Teke—is also a qualified electrician, a gifted college teacher, an accomplished musician, a property developer who built his own house, a competitive record-breaking sailor, an innovative multi-hulled boat builder, a husband, the father of two grown children and grandfather to two youngsters who share his love of sailing. 

Now 64 years old and semi-retired, Tekatch can trace his lifelong achievements back to his youth in Hamilton, Ont., where he developed a passion for technology and fast sailboats—two interests that drove his career path over nearly 50 years. 

By the time he finished high school in 1959, Tekatch’s goal was to enroll in post-secondary studies in the electronics field. But, with money too tight to pay school fees, he decided to enter a four-year electrical apprenticeship and go back to school later. While an apprentice making $48.50 a week, he married his wife Jean, had a son, Anthony, and then a daughter, Cathy. 

Despite having a young family, Tekatch didn’t give up on going back to school but he knew that it would take a huge effort. “I needed to get a good paying job, work a lot of overtime and save to pay for three years of college,” he says. “So, I worked three years for Dofasco and General Motors, averaging 100 hours a week until I had enough set aside so I could focus on my education.” 

In 1966, Tekatch enrolled in Mohawk College’s control system technology course, a specialized area of electronics with industrial applications. After working so hard to get there, he devoted himself to his studies, earned 4.0 grade point average and received Mohawk’s Gold Medal on graduation. “The long hours were hard on the family,” he admits, pointing out that he and Jean made sacrifices so he could start his own business. But, he hadn’t finished with school just yet. Although it took some convincing, Tekatch agreed to stay at Mohawk to create and teach an electrician Apprenticeship program—a course that still exists today. 

A year later, he joined the electronics department to teach feedback control systems, circuits, devices and computer logic. In total, he taught for seven years, the last two part-time as he finally got his long-awaited business off the ground. 

From a new home he’d built near Smithville, Tekatch designed a computer logic lab teaching system and, in 1973, started Tektron Equipment Corp. to manufacture and market the product. Tekatch was president and Jean was vice-president. Within a year they had six employees and moved into a Stoney Creek industrial park where the business grew into three divisions: electronic design, printed circuit boards (PCBs) and electronic assemblies. A plastic fabrication department was added later when Tekatch designed a line of printed circuit board manufacturing equipment for education, small business and the military. 

Inspired by his teaching experience, in 1979, Tekatch began to manufacture complete microprocessor systems, using 1802 RCA Cmos processors, which were sold as kits. A course to teach people how to use them was held at Mohawk College, McMaster University, University of Toronto and Northern Telecom. Altogether, about 1,000 students went through the course and Tekatch says people sometimes approach him to say they still have what they made from the kit. 

Getting into microprocessors early set the pattern for Tektron Equipment Corp. and during the 1980s, the company developed industrial microprocessors. All those years spent working for the steel industry had given Tekatch contacts which helped grow his business. Among many projects, Tektron designed and built an automated control system for 14 top hat annealing furnaces operating simultaneously at Stanley Steel. For Dofasco, Tektron built a control system for the temperature timing cycle in the soaking pits. A high-speed ultrasonic flaw detector for recording and mapping imperfections in sheets of steel was built for Stelco and a computerized announcement system was created for Procter & Gamble’s Hamilton warehouse. 

While all this was going on, Tekatch renewed his old love of sailing and bought a 33-foot trimaran which he raced on Lake Ontario. In 1984, he entered the boat in the TransAt Tag Race from Quebec City to Saint Malo, France, extending the length to 35 feet and sailing 1,000 miles along the Atlantic coast to qualify. With a crew of two, Tekatch’s boat made good time in the race, pounding through the 3,200 miles of rough water and set an unbeaten world record for a 35-foot boat crossing the Atlantic in 16 days, four hours. Although he didn’t win the race, Tekatch was hooked on the high performance of multi-hulls and went to meet John Shuttleworth, a British designer of multi-hulled vessels. On a tour of the boatyards on the Isle of Wight, Tekatch was impressed at seeing boxcars and military vehicles made from composite materials. He wondered if he could find someone to build him a multihulled boat out of composites based on Shuttleworth’s design. 

No one in Canada at that time was doing much with composites, so, in typical fashion for Tekatch, he decided to start a new Tektron division specializing in advanced composite fabrication. A composite engineer and a boat builder came over from England to teach Tekatch and his staff how to build a multi-hulled boat using composite materials. By 1988, Tekatch had the TekTron-50, a 50-foot racing catamaran outfitted with a new range of computerized yachting instruments. The plan was to race the 50-footer in the 1988 TransAT Tag Race. As before, he had to qualify the boat by running it down the coast to Bermuda and back. “That’s when we really found out about high performance,” Tekatch says. “This boat could accelerate from two to 15 knots very quickly—you had to hang on or fall off.” 

After finding out first-hand how well the boat could weather the outer winds of a hurricane, Tekatch and his crew were on their way back to Quebec City when the boat hit a huge standing wave over a rip tide 30 miles off Prince Edward Island. Although the broad-based design of a catamaran won’t let it sink, the boat pitch poled. With some of the crew hurt in the water and the boat floating upside down, Tekatch managed to get everyone inside the hatches. After long hours firing off flares, a boat arrived and a rescue began. It was disappointing to miss out on the race, but Tekatch learned something critical about the relationship between composites and metal. “Anything that was metal on the boat, all the connections around the mast and the crossbeam, failed,” he says. “So we learned that composites are best used by themselves.” 

Over the next years, with his son (also a Mohawk College electronics grad), his daughter and his wife all helping to manage the company, business continued to grow. By 1990, Tektron Equipment Corp. had five divisions (design, PCB, assembly, equipment and composites), 106 employees and customers including universities, colleges, military bases and private industry in Canada, the U.S., Japan and Venezuela. Tektron was producing 4.5 million printed circuit boards and 800,000 electronic assemblies per year. 

Tekatch’s timing for getting into composites had been perfect. “Not many others were doing it then,” he says. “Without any advertising, we got a lot of calls asking if we could make tooling for parts.” Of the many projects completed during the 1990s, the industrial composites division made fairing moulds for Boeing airplanes, routing and tooling parts for the Cormorant helicopter, the entire mould for the Diamond two-seater training aircraft and huge 12-foot by 80-foot moulds for Enron windmill blades. 

By 1997, Tekatch and Jean, who had managed the circuits department, decided it was time to slow down. The company was still growing at a healthy 25 percent but Tekatch sold off all but the composite division which he kept strictly for mold making and boat building. Tekatch’s boats became known worldwide for his innovative ideas in deck layout, engine installations, high performance and stability. The company built 15 multi-hulls for total sales of about $7 million. 

But, there comes a time when even a man like Eugene Tekatch calls it quits. In 2004, he closed down his composites company and sold the boat moulds to a builder in England. The last boat Tekatch built was the Tek-35, a 35-foot cruising multi-hulled sailboat which he kept for himself. His son Anthony now works as a computer system designer and project manager for a Burlington-based company and daughter Cathy has started her own business. 

These days Tekatch has gone back to where he started, tinkering with technology in a little workshop at his home where he’s doing research and development and studying physics. As has been his pattern, he plans to keep learning and applying what he learns. “There have been a lot of challenges throughout my life,” he says. “But I’ve never been afraid to jump into anything and I’ve always had a passion for what I was doing.” 

By: Sonya Felix

This story was originally published in Spring 2005 of the Mohawk Alumni In Touch magazine.