The delivery crew is paid, usually, but not extravagantly. The appeal of the work is partly the pay and partly the access it provides to ocean sailing without the expense of owning an offshore vessel. A young sailor with no boat of their own can accumulate substantial offshore miles by crewing on deliveries. The work carries real risk — you are at sea on someone else’s boat, often in waters outside your experience, working to a schedule that may not allow you to wait out bad weather the way a leisure sailor can — but it is accepted risk, understood by everyone who takes the job.
Richard Sharp and Tami Oldham were experienced enough in offshore sailing to understand what they were accepting when they took the Hazana delivery. They had sailed together for months on Sharp’s own boat; they knew each other’s capacities and limitations. The Tahiti-to-San Diego passage was demanding — over 4,000 miles, crossing the tropics in October, a month that falls within the later part of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season — but it was within the range of what experienced offshore sailors regularly undertook.
What they did not know, and could not have known with certainty, was that Hurricane Raymond would develop from a tropical wave that emerged from the Central American coast on October 5 and reach Category 4 intensity within six days. The speed of Raymond’s intensification — from first advisory to peak intensity in approximately 72 hours — was exceptional even by the standards of a year defined by above-average sea surface temperatures. The El Niño conditions of 1982-83 were among the most significant of the twentieth century, and the hurricane season that followed was partly a consequence of that thermal anomaly.