Lost at sea

Cruising pioneer Peter Tangvald's son, Thomas, disappeared after sailing from South America in 2014. Kathy Catton recalls her memories of him

Thomas Thor Tangvald was born at sea on his father's boat, L'Artemis de Pytheas. It was 1976, by which time Thomas's father Peter Tangvald was already a seasoned, competent sailor, having completed a five-year round-the-world voyage on an earlier boat, Dorothea, a 32ft cutter, with no motor, electricity or transmitter.

For Thomas, his life on the ocean, and less so on land, was a dichotomy of restrictions and freedoms. Sometimes gruelling, sometimes exhilarating and often brutal. By the age of 15, Thomas had witnessed the deaths of his mother, his stepmother and his father and half-sister.

My path collided with Thomas's when we arrived at Leeds University in September 1994. Both aged 18, we seemingly had much in common. We had a love of languages, a love of sailing, and we both had the desire to find freedom. But that was where the similarities ended.

Harrowing loss

When Thomas first told me about the shipwreck that killed his father and half-sister on the coast of Bonaire, in the Dutch West Indies, he seemed very casual about it. It was early in our relationship, and I couldn't understand how he could recount something so heart-breaking in such a straightforward manner; he almost appeared hardened to the trauma. But he was not without vulnerability. As he wrote in the epilogue of his father's posthumous autobiography, At Any Cost:

"... Then I saw the broad white line, the boiling foam of relentless, charging waves crashing onto the shore. In seconds L'Artemis was on it, the bow plunging down and the stern rising with such violence as to knock all the wind out of the main. 'Non! Non!' I screamed as if it was going to make any difference..." Thomas described to me how he rushed to grab his surfboard as L'Artemis de Pytheas's bow slammed into the coral rock. In complete darkness (there was no moon that night), Thomas struggled to untie the knot securing his surfboard.