Well into his third cruise of the day, with two more to go before he can think about furling the sails and flopping into his bunk, Jeff Crafts still manages some lively banter with the passengers lounging on the deck of the Rachel B. Jackson.

“I’ve had my captain’s license since I was 18,” he tells the 30 or so people who had boarded the schooner at Southwest Harbor’s Manset dock. “So, it’s not as if you’re running around out here with some nutty civil engineer.”

Shouted over the steady breeze and the snapping sails, the skipper’s statement gets a laugh from the daytrippers gathered around him. But it’s only partially true: Crafts may not be nutty, but he is a civil engineer — apparently a successful one.

At this time last year, in fact, he was making his living as the designer of the controversial third traffic tunnel proposed for construction in Boston Harbor. Whether the unrelenting political wrangle over the project would eventually have driven him nuts is a moot point now. Crafts decided not to stay and find out.

Without regret, he chucked it all and went home to Southwest Harbor last fall. Which is how he came to be standing at the helm of this 67-foot windjammer, preparing to make his ninth dock landing in two days and relishing every moment of it.

At least here in Southwest Harbor, he knows which way the wind blows.

Crafts, 39, is the eighth generation of his family to be born in this pretty Mount Desert Island town, home of the renowned Hinckley yacht. Drawn to boats at an early age, he spent his youth running mail and freight to the Cranberry Islands, and lobstering through his four years at Mount Desert Island High School. As a teen-age captain, he piloted ferries and charter boats all around these familiar islands.

One night, while driving a boatload of passengers for the Beal & Bunker ferry, Crafts heard cries of help coming from the waters of Great Harbor. He turned on the searchlights but saw nothing in the blackness.

After reversing course, Crafts spotted a woman clutching a nearly drowned man and managed to pluck them from the water. Upon hearing of the rescue, a philanthropist who summered in Southwest Harbor decided that such heroism deserved more than a handshake and a picture in the paper.

The man, a civil engineer, offered to pay for Craft’s entire education at the University of Maine. Not surprisingly, Crafts studied civil engineering.

He graduated in 1975 and spent the next several years working on projects in Texas, Colorado, and New Hampshire. When he got the job of designing the Boston Harbor tunnel, Crafts commuted to Massachusetts each day from southern Maine, where he lived with his wife and two young sons.

The tunnel, which would pipe traffic under the harbor from I-90 to Logan Airport, posed a nagging web of problems that had nothing to do with civil engineering. Depending on what politician was stumping and the voters he wished to please, the tunnel was either a boondoggle or a blessing.

“It was all based on what constituents were pushing the buttons,” Crafts said. “Two big Massachusetts agencies were colliding over it. I was tired of beating my head against the wall for three years, of the repetitive paper-pushing, of all the revisions. I was tired of commuting to the city. I took my opportunity and cashed it in.”

There were other considerations, too. After 17 years away from home, Crafts wanted to spend time with his 76-year-old father, an engineer turned boatbuilder. Besides that, his grandmother had left him a house in Southwest Harbor.

Last Thanksgiving, Crafts noticed in a boating magazine that Rachel B. Jackson was for sale in Houston, Texas. The 10-year-old boat had been built in Jonesport according to a sturdy, 1890 coastal-schooner design. Originally commissioned by the Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, the schooner was later bought by a Texas oceanographer, who sailed it for three years around the world.

Intrigued, Crafts flew to Houston to see it. His wife did not, however, and they eventually separated.

“To be honest, I was hoping the boat would be in such poor shape that I wouldn’t want to buy it, or so expensive that I couldn’t buy it,” he said. “But it was perfect. I knew it belonged back in Maine.”

With the help of a local bank, Crafts bought the schooner for $250,000. He sailed it through the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida, and up the coast to Southwest Harbor, where he dropped anchor on April 27.

“Bar Harbor has always had schooners, but this is the first one out of Southwest Harbor, on what is called the quiet side of the island,” he said. “Some people were skeptical, mostly because there had never been one here before. They figured it couldn’t work.”

So far, it has. Aside from the four 2 1/2-hour cruises that are offered each day, the Rachel B. Jackson is transformed into a floating bed-and-breakfast inn at night. After being rocked to sleep at a mooring in Somes Sound, guests awake to breakfast on deck and the stunning 1,200-foot-high cliffs of Valley Cove, the only fiord on the east coast.

Crafts’ seven-member team includes his father, who usually welcomes people aboard the schooner with a joke and a story or two. Sadie, an elderly black lab known as “Schooner Dog,” is pictured on the flag that flies from the mast.

“She’s famous, too,” said Crafts, whose Schooner Dog tale is a routine part of the cruising itinerary. “Her story was in USA Today.”

Sadie, who loves to swim, once dog-paddled out to greet the boat and got her head caught in the floats underneath the dock. No one could see her in the water, and she never barked. A golden retriever was playing on the dock when he suddenly lay down and wouldn’t budge. Crafts and the others ripped up the planks and found Schooner Dog.

“She had been in the 42-degree water for 50 hours,” Crafts told the delighted passengers. “She had lost 10 pounds. When she wobbled up onto the dock, the first thing she did was jump into the water and go for a swim.”

After his first season in Southwest Harbor, blowing around the islands he knew as a child, Crafts is confident of many more. He is precisely where he wants to be, and living the life he dreamed of during those years of bureaucratic chaos in Boston.

“I really love this island and what it has to offer,” Crafts said as the schooner rounded a point and headed for home. “I want to give something back to this place.”