She tied her engagement ring to a rose and set it adrift. This specific act of memorial — a physical gesture that combined grief with ceremony — is one of the details she returns to in describing how she processed the loss of Richard Sharp. The ring, the rose, the sea receiving them: a small private ritual that was the closest she came, in those years, to a funeral.
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## Going Back to Sea
The first extended sailing voyage she made after the Hazana episode was a six-month crew voyage through the Fiji Islands. This is a remarkable decision in the context of what she had just survived, and she describes it as cathartic: returning to the ocean on her own terms, sailing in conditions she chose, confirming that the sea was still a place she belonged rather than a place that had taken something from her.
This response — returning to the site and context of trauma rather than avoiding it — is not the universal pattern of trauma survivors, but it is well-documented among people for whom the traumatic activity is also central to their identity. For Oldham Ashcraft, the ocean was not incidental to who she was; it was essential. Giving it up would have been a different kind of loss.
She went on to accumulate more than 50,000 offshore miles and obtained a 100-ton U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license — a credential requiring demonstrated competence in navigation, seamanship, and maritime law, and roughly analogous to a commercial pilot’s license in the aviation world. She became, in formal legal and professional terms, a highly qualified mariner.