—
## Richard Sharp and the Mayaluga
The accounts of Richard Sharp that survive are filtered through Tami Oldham Ashcraft’s memoir and subsequent interviews. She describes him with consistent warmth — funny, well-read, sociable, adventurous, the kind of person who would spend hours in conversation about almost anything and then get up and do something physically demanding. He was 34 in 1983, eleven years older than Oldham, British, and a serious sailor with significant offshore experience.
Sharp owned a 36-foot sailboat called the Mayaluga, and the two had spent the months before the Tahiti-to-San Diego voyage sailing the South Pacific together on this boat. The Mayaluga was Sharp’s vessel; the Hazana was someone else’s. The pleasure sailing they had done together — the island harbors and calm passages of the South Pacific under ordinary conditions — was the basis of their partnership as sailors and the beginning of their engagement.
The couple had developed, over those months of shared sailing, a working partnership that functioned in the specific ways that offshore couples’ partnerships often do: a division of labor both formal and informal, an understanding of each other’s judgment and limitations, the kind of trust that comes from being at sea together when things go wrong in ways that stop short of catastrophe and from figuring out the solutions together.
What they were about to undertake was different in kind from what they had done on the Mayaluga. The Hazana was a 44-foot yacht — larger, more complex, and loaded with the specific challenges of a delivery voyage: a boat you don’t know well, a timeline, a destination on the other side of the Pacific. The passage from Papeete to San Diego covered more than 4,000 miles. It was the longest offshore passage either of them had made together.