Jan. 16/2025: ‘Tis a bit discouraging, I have to admit. The last time we cruised the Spanish Virgin Islands as a family was 12 years ago, and when I asked the kids (now ages 25 and 19) what they remember about it (they were then ages 13 and 7), they said they recalled very little. It’s like I needn’t have bothered. Hopefully they will somehow manage to remember the post-Xmas/New Year’s cruise we took this year.
Jay (then Lucy, on the left) and Una (still Una, on the right) aboard the previous Lunacy, sailing the Spanish Virgins in 2013. Photo up top shows Una aboard the present Lunacy, anchored at Culebra, earlier this month.
Full-size contemporary Jay aboard Lunacy, marveling at the size of Puerto Rican avocados. Jay is a big fan of avocados!
I certainly remember the time I spent sailing Puerto Rican waters back in 2013, for it was then that I first stumbled across evidence of Thomas Tangvald’s adulthood, in the form of an article he had just published in All at Sea, the local Caribbean sailing rag. This ultimately led me on a years-long quest to tell Thomas’s story, after he disappeared at sea off the coast of Brazil in the spring of 2014. The result of which, of course, was the biography of Thomas I wrote, The Boy Who Fell to Shore, required reading for all who spend more than five minutes studying this blog.
I was sort of haunted by Thomas during this year’s cruise, most particularly when we sailed into Culebra. It was a particularly important island for Thomas, and this was the first time I’d visited since he disappeared. I felt his presence everywhere, most especially as we sailed through the cut in the reef out at Dakity into the great bay of Ensenada Honda. It was somewhere right around the entrance of the bay, I remembered, that Thomas lost his 22-foot Itchen Ferry cutter Melody. A big part of me wanted to immediately pull over, anchor the boat, pull on a mask and snorkel, and going searching for her wreck.
The cover of my book features a photo of Thomas standing atop Melody, anchored at Culebra behind the reef at Dakity. Thomas sailed this boat non-stop, singlehanded, from Cornwall, England, to Culebra in the spring of 2000, arriving just a few months after I first visited the island in late 1999. For Thomas this was his long-awaited return to the world and life he lost after he was orphaned, at age 15, in a wreck on Bonaire in 1991. Thomas neglected Melody after arriving in Culebra (note her derelict condition in this image) and she ultimately sank irretrievably when he tried to shift her to a new location in 2006.
Lunacy anchored out at Dakity earlier this month, with a light squall bearing down on us.
Thomas sailing his 17-foot “mini-nativo” sloop Buenadaga out at Dakity, probably around 2004. Thomas sailed this boat a few times 30 miles to windward in the Caribbean tradewinds up to Jost van Dyke, where he twice raced her in Foxy’s Wooden Boat Regatta.
Thomas aboard Melody on the town dock at Dewey, near the head of Ensenada Honda. He’d be surprised to see how fancy the dock is now and likely would not be happy to see how many tourists are wandering about the island now.
Exhibit A: a small cruise ship disguised as a superyacht that came in while we were at Culebra and spewed passengers on to the island for a few hours. There are freakin’ cruise ships everywhere these days!!!
Some things haven’t changed. This derelict Travelift, on the canal in Dewey, was also derelict back in Thomas’s day, thus complicating his efforts to haul out Melody so as to cure the teredo worms that infested her keel and hull.
In the anchorage off Dewey, I was also pleased to see a number of modest cruising monohulls of the sort I often encountered in my younger days and only one modern multihull. I was particularly pleased to see this old Pearson Alberg 35, of the same vintage as my old boat Crazy Horse… with a Monitor windvane even!
Your humble author and narrator, showing off a derelict Sherman tank behind the beach at Playa Flamenco, on Culebra’s north shore.
Una and Jay beside another derelict tank right on the beach. The U.S. military practiced amphibious landings here back during WWII and evidently trashed a few tanks doing it. In Thomas’s day (and the very first time I visited) the beach was largely undeveloped. Now there is paid parking in a large paved lot, a fee to pay just to walk on to the beach, and a host of small businesses here.
Clare and the offspring waiting for dinner at the Dinghy Dock restaurant in Dewey, an eatery that has long endured. I first ate here in 1999, though it wasn’t nearly so fancy back then. Now you may have to wait as long as an hour to get a table!
The Kokomo Hotel, behind the ferry dock in Dewey. Thomas managed this hotel for a while during the 10 years he spent on Culebra. Now it’s up for sale for a cool $2.9 million.
Of course, we didn’t spend all of our time on Culebra. En route there from Salinas we visited the little town of Patillas, on the south coast of the main island of Puerto Rico, and also Vieques, Culebra’s larger sister island. Clare and the kids were last on Vieques in 2013, when we visited both Esperanza, a village on the island’s south coast, and the so-called Green Beach at the island’s west end. I had last visited the island in 2019, while researching my book about Thomas, when I met up with Thomas’s foster mother, Clare Allcard, and his wife, Christina Pasquinucci, and visited the house that Thomas and Christina built there together.
The sunset scene on the waterfront in Esperanza on New Year’s Eve 2024.
Our hero checking out a new pair of shades in a fancy hotel gift store in Esperanza. Last time we were in Esperanza together, there was no such thing as fancy hotels!
One thing they still have on Vieques, and likely will always have, is stray horses. They have stray horses here like other Caribbean islands have stray dogs. You often see them rooting around like dogs in trash bins. Or grazing like horses, of course. This is one place where no one need worry about mowing their lawn.
A few days after we motorsailed from Esperanza around to Culebra, we had a crew change. Clare and Jay hopped a ferry to the big island (the fare is just $2.50, a real bargain!) and Una’s old college bestie Sarah flew in on a puddle-jumper to take their place. Next day we three sailed back to Vieques and anchored off Green Beach, looking to make miles back toward Salinas.
A fortuitous encounter on Facebook had put me in touch with Christina Pasquinucci, who just happened to also be vacationing on Vieques, staying with her family in the house Thomas built many years earlier. She insisted on having us dinner, and the whole family drove half the length of the island to pick us up.
The house on Vieques when I last visited it, in 2019.
The house on Vieques today. Christina’s partner Luis has done a great job of fixing it up!
A hot game of roulette in the kitchen. That’s Thomas’s younger son Lucio on the left (with Sarah’s face under his chin). Christina’s son with Luis, Leandro, is manning the wheel. And that’s Una behind the flower arrangement.
Thomas’s older son Gaston studies his phone in the living room.
Leandro demonstrates his drone-flying expertise on the porch outside, with Una and Sarah looking on.
Gaston and Lucio back in 2019, when I had them as guests aboard Lunacy.
A fine time was had by all! And the following day we got lucky. The forecast for zero breeze was wrong, and we instead had a moderate easterly to waft us back to Salinas.
Now I’m back shivering on the frozen tundra in New Hampshire, looking very forward to getting back to the boat and Puerto Rico next month.
Meanwhile, for the umpteenth time, I urge you to buy my book and learn all you can about Thomas Tangvald. His life makes for a fascinating story!
You can order a copy direct from the publisher right here. Once you’ve read the book and have developed informed opinions about Thomas’s controversial life, drop me a line via the site here, and we can organize me signing it for you.
The book is a good read.
Welcome back, just in time for the next cold snap.
The book is a fantastic read, and a damned good title. I’ve shared copies with non-sailors who were blown away by the storyline and the telling of it. Very fine work — I’ll be bothering Charlie soon to get a new copy signed for even wider circulation.
Yes, excellent book, well researched. Horribly sad. Was Thomas’s boat ever found, or will he be forever lost at sea like Joshua Slocum?
Hi Robert! No, as far as I know Thomas’s boat Oasis has never been found. Very much like Slocum’s disappearance! I expect we’ll never know what happened.