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## Arrival
Tami Oldham Ashcraft stepped ashore in Hilo in an extraordinary combination of physical states. She had survived a Category 4 hurricane, a 27-hour period of unconsciousness, a dismasting, 41 days of solo ocean passage-making, a head injury, blood loss, dehydration, and near-starvation. She had made every navigational decision correctly. She had reached the specific island she was aiming for.
She wept.
Her mother, Zonna Roberts, traveled from San Diego to Hilo to meet her. The specific reunion between them is not described in detail in the sources consulted for this article. What is documented is that Ashcraft arrived in a state requiring medical attention and significant recovery time, and that the people who met her at Hilo were confronted with someone who had come through something beyond most people’s capacity to fully understand.
The Hazana had survived too, though damaged. The yacht she had been hired to deliver had been carried to Hawaii rather than San Diego, and in a condition that required substantial repair. The specific disposition of the vessel after the voyage is not established in the sources consulted.
She opened the last beer on the boat. She had been saving it.
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## The Head Wound and the Years After
The head injury Tami Oldham Ashcraft sustained in the capsize proved to have long-term consequences that she did not understand until she tried to resume normal life.
The injury was severe — a deep gash on her forehead, sustained when she was thrown against the cabin wall during the capsize. She did not stitch it during the 41 days at sea. She could not bring herself to, she later wrote; instead she closed the wound with butterfly bandages, the small adhesive strips designed to hold wound edges together without sutures. The wound healed under those conditions, but the underlying neurological damage from 27 hours of unconsciousness was not something a butterfly bandage could address.