Tami Oldham Ashcraft navigated alone to Hawaii not because no one was looking for her, but because no one was looking for her at all. She had no rescue to wait for.
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## What Celestial Navigation Requires Under Normal Conditions
The practice of celestial navigation that Tami Oldham Ashcraft used to reach Hawaii is worth explaining in some detail, because understanding it makes the achievement clearer.
Under normal conditions — a crewed vessel, adequate sleep, undamaged equipment, a stable psychological state — celestial navigation is a skill that requires practice and concentration but is well within the capacity of any sailor who has taken a navigation course and kept their skills current. The instruments required are a sextant (to measure angles), an accurate chronometer or watch (to record time), a nautical almanac (to look up celestial body positions), and sight reduction tables (to perform the geometric calculations from the measured angle and recorded time). The process takes approximately 20 minutes per fix, and a good navigator will take multiple sights at each session to reduce random measurement error.
Oldham was doing this after a head injury that had rendered her unconscious for 27 hours. She was doing it alone, with no second navigator to verify her work. She was doing it on a moving, damaged vessel that she was simultaneously pumping, steering, and maintaining. She was doing it while in various states of dehydration, grief, and psychological stress. And she was doing it knowing that a systematic error in her calculations would put her miles from Hawaii with no way to find it.