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It helps that sailing meshes with Jeff’s personality. A gregarious man, he enjoys sharing cruising stories with new friends. On his latest trip, while visiting Turnagain Bay with his wife Laura and son Duncan, Windward was swarmed by mosquitoes. They invaded the cabin and the three sailors smashed so many of the blood-engorged mosquitoes that the boat’s interior “looked like a blood bath”.

Even with the hatches closed, the mosquitoes kept finding their way in. The mystery was solved when the flying bloodsuckers were spotted flying up from the sink. Seems the creatures were entering the vessel from the only remaining opening – the sink drain. Plugging the entry won Jeff’s family a marginally bite-free night’s rest.

Fishing tackle: Off Cape Lookout, Jeff and friend Sam Shafer caught a 3-pound Spanish mackerel, a 6-pound king mackerel, and a few bonita. Most exciting was “foul hooking a shark while flying the spinnaker”.

But just much as he enjoys social time, Jeff says he needs alone time. By nature, he considers himself “an introvert”.

Jeff disagrees with the common perception that introverts are just people who want to be left alone. In his opinion, introversion is more about how a person, quite possibly a very outgoing one, regroups between social encounters. In his case, being an introvert is defined by “how I recharge – and I like to recharge alone”.

For some folks that means reading. For others, it means hiking alone. For Jeff, that means sailing – a lot.

Jeff works with the National Climatic Data Center, a branch of NOAA. His specialty is working with metadata – data about data. In keeping with his job as a numbers person, he’s kept detailed records of his outings in his shipboard log. One year, he sailed Windward 108 days. Some days he sailed alone. Many, he sailed with his wife, son or friends. In one five-year span, from 2002 to 2007, he logged 405 days on the water. That’s in addition to the days he visited Windward but never left the dock.

Triple reefed: Jeff keeps Windward on Lake Watauga, Tennessee, half an hour away from his home. That way “if I have 3 free hours, I can be on her 2 of them.” (Jeff Arnfield photo)

So what type of boat does Jeff, family and career man, sail?

It’s one he paid $500 dollars for. One that, when it showed up in his life, was colored “Mary Kay pink”.

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Posted Wednesday November 10, 2010 by Bernie Harberts

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