People

Rob Macfarlane (owner)

Who is Rob? What does he does? Why does he have a boat?

Rob is 42 now, grew up sailing on boats with his parents, as did my Father and his parents before him.

I currently work at Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in the Enterprise Decision Support System group, working with ETL tools (DataStage) and databases (Oracle), along with Unix, Windows, and people. I'm responsible for finding out where the data is and getting the data into a usable format for the 3,000 people at the laboratory.

Why a boat? I didn't have enough money to buy a house, and instead my dad suggested, "Why not live on a boat?" So I bought a Newport 33 in 1989 and had a super time with her - racing singlehanded, sailing all over the place, a race to Hawaii in 1996 and then I sold the boat in 1998 (but, unfortunately, not before buying the current Tiger Beetle, so I was a two boat owner for a year and a half).

My intent is to go world cruising, and to that end I have rebuilt Beetle, done a lot of sailing with some great people. Through it all I've thoroughly enjoyed myself on the ocean, be it racing, cruising or delivering biologists to their destination.

Enjoy!

- Rob