Stan’s guest this week is author and former This Old House host Steve Thomas, discussing the revised and expanded version of his book, The Last Navigator: A Young Man, an Ancient Mariner, the Secrets of the Sea (Abbeville Press). Steve hosted PBS’s This Old House for fourteen years, from 1989 through 2003, during which the show rose to the top of PBS’s list of most-watched ongoing series. He was honored with a 1997-1998 Daytime Emmy Award and in 2022 received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy for his work. A lifelong sailor, Steve developed a fascination with ancient methods of navigation. For thousands of years, the peoples of Oceania sailed across the Pacific without compass or charts, guided only by the stars, waves, and the flight paths of birds. In search of this secret knowledge, Steve traveled to the tiny island of Satawal in Micronesia, and his book he tells the story of how he convinced one of the last surviving navigators to accept him as his student and teach him the closely guarded Talk of Navigation. Forty years after his original journey, Steve has worked with a new generation of researchers and natives of Satawal to publish a revised edition of The Last Navigator.