Oct. 21/2024: The opening photo here says it all for me. Thomas Tangvald’s youngest half-sister Virginia sitting in the same spot I sat in some time prior to her, researching the tragic Tangvald legacy. This from her film Les enfants du large (translating as Ghosts of the Sea in English), which premiered at a film...
July 5/2023: This was the scene last week off Chandler Cove, on the bar between Great Chebeague and Little Chebeague Islands just north of Portland, after I intentionally grounded Lunacy to give her bottom a scrub and check on her prop zinc. This bar is quite close to my mooring behind Maine Yacht Center, with...
April 24/2023: The strange true story of Thomas Tangvald, a boy who was born at sea and was raised on a cruising sailboat, but then was orphaned in a terrible wreck in the Caribbean, has captured the imaginations of both sailors and non-sailors alike. I’ll be at the Spaulding Marine Center in Sausalito at 7pm...
“Lyrical, engaging, and true,” writes prize-winning historian W. Jeffrey Bolster of my biography of Thomas Tangvald, The Boy Who Fell to Shore, recently published by Latah Books. “Doane reconstructs the searing tragedy, apparent resilience, and ultimate vulnerability of a brilliant young man better suited to navigating the sea than life itself. It’s gripping—a thriller to...
Dec. 6/2022: As mentioned in my last post sharing extra pix of Thomas, the first boat he owned himself was a scrappy little Chapelle-designed scow, Spartan, that he bought in Puerto Rico for just $200. This boat, along with L’Artemis de Pytheas, the boat he grew up on, was destroyed in the terrible wreck that...
Nov. 3/2022: The bomb has dropped, my friends. The new book came out last week and—as of this moment at least—is the Number 1 Bestseller in Amazon’s Aviation & Nautical Biographies category. I urge you to check it out and click BUY here on Amazon (please leave a rating and review if you do!), or...
May 23/22: It’s happening, my friends! My new book is in the pipe, crawling ever closer to the light at the end of the tunnel, and you can now pre-order your copy direct from the publisher: https://www.latahbooks.com/blank-1/the-boy-who-fell-to-shore The scheduled publication date is October 25. Pre-ordered books will ship no later than that date. Don’t be...
Apr. 7/2022: It’s been a long strange trip, my friends—researching, writing, and finding a publisher for this story—but at last it is happening. My third book will be published this coming October by Latah Books. Faithful WaveTrain riders will recall that I first “rediscovered” Thomas nine years ago, in the spring of 2013, while noodling...
I continue to be fascinated by the Tangvald family: young Thomas, who sailed with his young son and pregnant wife from Puerto Rico to Brazil aboard an engineless 34-foot nativo racing sloop and was subsequently lost at sea off the South American coast sailing the same vessel singlehanded in 2014; and his father Peter, who...
I really really hope this turns out not to be true. You'll recall I published a rather long post last spring about Thomas Tangvald, son of the famous traditional-boat cruiser Peter Tangvald. Thomas, who lost his dad and half-sister Carmen on reef off Bonaire when he was just 15, had started publishing a series of...
