Jason Harvey and Raymond Lambert.

After years of sailing together during summer holidays, friends James Harvey, 24, and Raymond Lambert, 27, opened Windjammer Enterprises a boat-building business at Dockyard in November, 1989.

Raymond: Jamie and I were neighbours growing up. We lived about a stones throw away from each other on Scaur Hill in Somerset. We both had the same sort of upbringing and we both grew up around the water. James was a bit younger than me so we weren't really good friends until we got a bit older. We didn't really start hanging out until after we had graduated from high school.

Both of us have always had an interest in sailing and fishing and we both spent a lot of time at the West End Sailing Club. We both sailed comets there.

It was there that we started talking about things, like how we both would have loved to have staged a regatta - invite top sailors to sail Comets. We talked about it a bit more, and a lot of people had doubts about it, but we did it, in August, 1988, after thinking first about it in May or June. We called it the Comet Invitational Championship Regatta, and it was sponsored by Frith's Liquors. It brought together Bermuda's best sailors and it exposed us to a lot of our peers. It was quite an accomplishment.

Because it worked so well, we thought we wanted to do something like it again, and we started thinking about how we could bring boats in for the races. In the summers, Jamie worked as a sailing instructor, and I had worked at PWs Marine Centre. We both had our ambitions, and we talked about them while we were both at college (I was in New Jersey and he was in Toronto), usually late night telephone calls after we had both been out.

We had talked about building Optimists. There was a lot of talk, but we started to do some research. I studied marketing at Glasborough State College in New Jersey. Before we actually started up in November, 1989, we did all sorts of research, looking into the feasibility of bringing boats in. Now we do much more than that. We do a lot of custom fibreglassing. But we really consider ourselves concept developers. I'm the one who figures out what will sell and what won't. James' forte is keeping up with new materials used in the business. The boat building business has changed a lot over the years, and there are all sorts of new materials being used all the time. James also deals more with manufacturers overseas, and I do the purchasing in Bermuda.

I think we both have the same type of attitude. We're young and we've made mistakes along the way. But we're both young enough that whatever mistakes we do make, we'll bounce back. I hope we'll always be friends. For us, I think friendship is more important than business.

James is more involved in the sailing school in the summertime. It goes on for eight weeks in the summer, during week days for two weeks at a time. We usually have about 15 youngsters in the courses. It's more Jamie's thing. I'm more involved in the administration side of that.

James: When we were younger, we were both so involved in sailing, and living in the same neighbourhood, we had very similar upbringings. Though Raymond's got a couple of years on me, it never really seemed to matter too much. When we went off to college, we corresponded through college quite a bit, and during the summers we would see each other through sailing. Then we came up with the grand idea that we would get a sailing programme going oursleves. We talked about how we would get our own boats to Bermuda. Then we were told that the cheapest way to get boats here would be to build them ourselves. I had a friend at Ontario Yachts in Canada, so Raymond and I went there and took a week-and-a-half long crash course in how to build International Optimist dinghies. We looked into how much it would cost and decided we might as well do it oursleves, at least on a part-time basis, then it became full-time. Now it's a big part of what we do.

We do a lot of research during our spare time during the day. My responsibility is the sailing school during the summer, and when it comes to boat building, I spend more time doing the fibreglassing. Raymond works more on the powerboat scene. It's a little premature to talk about that right now, but I think at some point we'd like to get into high performance boats.

As far as our day-to-day work, we really work as a team. If I don't do something, Raymond will do it. We're on a very similar wavelength, personally and as far as the business goes. We have the same goals. We both enjoy the water and boats. And we both give each other a lot of freedom and room to do whatwe each want to do. We discuss things a lot, and neither one of us is a pushover. Our work doesn't stop at 5 o'clock so it's important we get along together and respect each other. I like to think we'll always be friends and in business together. I think it's pretty important that we're young because that's part of our motivation. We have to make it work. It's also important that we're close in age because I'm not sure the partnership would work as well if one of us was a lot older than the other. This way we're both learning as we go along, and we both respect each other.

I think what we're doing is very important to young kids in Bermuda. It keeps them busy, and this is how many of Bermuda's top sailors started out. We really like what we're dong, but it serves a purpose too.

I think the most important thing for us is that we both enjoy what we do. It's not just work to either of us.

Partners: Raymond Lambert, left, and James Harvey.