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## A San Diego Childhood and the First Ocean
Tami Lee Oldham was born on February 20, 1960, in San Diego, California. San Diego is a naval city, a harbor city, a city where the ocean is not an abstraction but a constant physical presence. The specific geography of childhood shapes the specific geography of imagination, and Oldham grew up in a place where people go on the water.
Her first sailing was on her father’s Hobie Cat — a small, fast catamaran designed for the kind of coastal sailing where the shore is always visible and the water is shallow enough to stand in. The Hobie Cat is a beach boat, a beginner’s boat, the kind of craft that teaches you how wind and water interact without putting you far enough from land for the interaction to become fatal.
She graduated, in ambition if not immediately in practice, to larger waters and longer passages. Her first Pacific crossing came in 1979, when she was nineteen. She was not, by her own account, a highly technical navigator at that point; she describes herself as someone who learned to sail by going sailing, who got comfortable on the water through exposure rather than formal instruction. She enjoyed plotting courses on nautical charts — the specific pleasures of dead reckoning, of estimating where you are from where you were and how fast you’ve been going — but she did not think of herself as a master of celestial navigation.
What she had, by the time she met Richard Sharp in the early 1980s, was several years of offshore sailing experience, the kind of practical knowledge that develops from passages made successfully and mistakes learned from, and an appetite for more. She was living the life that a certain kind of young American sailor lived in those years: moving between island harbors, taking crew berths on delivery voyages, working on boats to fund the next passage.