## The Moment She Realized He Was Gone
When Tami Oldham regained consciousness, the first thing she registered was water. It was pouring through the companionway, sloshing across the cabin sole, covering the cushions. The yacht was still floating — barely. The masts were gone. The sails were gone. The radio was gone. The emergency beacon was gone. The electronic navigation system was gone.
Richard Sharp was gone.
She had been unconscious for approximately 27 hours. The storm that had knocked her unconscious had moved on. The Pacific Ocean had resumed its indifferent rhythms. She was alone on a dismasted, partially flooded, 44-foot fiberglass hull somewhere in the eastern Pacific, roughly 1,500 miles from Hawaii and considerably farther from anywhere else that might have people in it.
She was 23 years old, and she had a decision to make: whether to stay alive or not.
The story of Tami Oldham Ashcraft — she did not yet have the second surname, because the man she would have married was dead — is one of the most demanding survival accounts in the history of offshore sailing. It involves celestial navigation performed solo on a damaged vessel, 41 days at sea alone, and a psychological ordeal that she describes in her 2002 memoir, *Red Sky in Mourning*, with the honesty of someone who has had nearly twenty years to decide what to include.
The story does not begin in the Pacific. It begins in San Diego, in a life shaped from an early age by the sea.