Known as one of the early deep-sea cruising pioneers and for his 1966 book Sea Gypsy, he reached notoriety after two of his seven wives[vague] had been lost at sea.

[1][2][3] He himself drowned, along with his daughter Carmen, when his engineless yacht was wrecked in Bonaire in 1991.

[1][2] His son Thomas escaped the accident, but suffered a similar fate when his own yacht was lost at sea years later, in 2014.

[4][5] In 2024, his daughter Virginia Tangvald, who was just five years old when her father died, released Ghosts of the Sea (Les Enfants du large), a multimedia book and documentary film project about coming to terms with the loss of her father and brother.

[6] The book was published in September,[7] while the film, a Canadian-French coproduction, premiered at the 2024 Festival du nouveau cinéma in October.