Steve Thomas

Emmy Award winning TV Host and Producer, Steve Thomas hosted PBS's This Old House and Discovery's Renovation Nation, on Planet Green. He was honored with a 1997-1998 Daytime Emmy Award and in 2022 a Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award. He has a lifelong interest in building, sailing and navigation.

Steve's yen for adventure, which he attributes to his late grandfather, a missionary in the Alaskan Arctic, inspired him to combine his love of fine woodworking with his passion for the sea and sailboats. In 1977, he worked as a carpenter on a 75-foot ketch being built in Antibes, France. Over the next few years, he logged many blue-water miles sailing a 43-foot wooden sloop from England to San Francisco via the Panama Canal, Galapagos, Marquesas and Hawaii.



In the early 1980s, he journeyed to the remote Micronesian island of Satawal to learn the ancient technique of star path navigation under the master navigator, Mau Piailug. Steve's research resulted in the critically acclaimed book, The Last Navigator, published in 1987. The next year he returned with a film crew to shoot a documentary of the same title for the PBS series Adventure. In November, 2025, Abbeville Press is publishing a Revised Edition with many of Steve's now-historic photographs.

It was in 1989, in between research trips to the Alaskan Arctic for a second Adventure book and film, when he received a call from the Adventure series publicist, who also worked for This Old House. The show's producers were conducting a national search for a new host, and the rest is history.

He now lives in a small fishing village in mid-coast Maine, where he is a builder and writer and oyster lover.