In 1994, she married Edward Ashcraft, taking the surname she has carried since. They have two children. The family has lived on San Juan Island, Washington — a small island accessible by ferry, a place where the marine environment is a constant presence in daily life.
She wears, every day, a diamond-encrusted sextant pendant. She has described it as a reminder of how she got home.
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## *Red Sky in Mourning*
Tami Oldham Ashcraft began working on the account of what had happened to her in the years after her return from Hilo, but the head injury that prevented her from reading also complicated writing. It was not until approximately six years after the voyage that she could fully engage with the written word again, and not until many more years that she was ready to tell the story in a form that would be published.
She initially self-published the memoir in 1998 under the title *Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea*, co-written with Susea McGearhart. The book was subsequently picked up by Hyperion Press and published in 2002, and was later reissued by a Hachette imprint under the alternate title *Adrift*. It was translated into eight languages and published in fifteen countries.
The title *Red Sky in Mourning* draws on the traditional sailor’s weather maxim: “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in morning, sailor’s warning.” The title holds both meanings — the sky of warning that preceded the hurricane, and the sky of grief that followed Richard Sharp’s death. It is a sailor’s title, rooted in the specific vocabulary of a life spent reading weather over open water.