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A BILLIONAIRE FINALLY GETS HIS YACHT.

- Michael Peters

Offshore powerboat racing has always had its share of mysterious people of questionable backgrounds, so I took it in stride that Kjell Røkke’s story sounded too incredible to be true. By the time I met him in the early 1990s his claim to fame was that he started out on the back deck of an Alaskan fishing trawler cutting bait and ended up buying the boat, on his way to owning American Seafoods, one of the world’s largest fishing fleets. While not quite yet a billionaire by his mid-30s, he had done all of this, suffering from dyslexia and without finishing high school.

He was racing under the banner of KR Racing in 1994 when he asked me to design a pair of advanced composite offshore racing catamarans to be built by Tencara, in Italy. One was to be named Helly Hansen, after one of his companies and the other Spirit of Norway, built for his childhood friend to race. At an offshore race in Key West, Kjell had invited his parents and some of his old fishing buddies to join him. After meeting his very humble parents and listening to the tales from his old crewmates, it became obvious the unlikely stories of his rise to wealth were true.