The North Equatorial Current running at up to six knots was essential insurance against the precision requirements of the navigation. If her daily positions were off by a few miles, the current was moving her steadily in the right direction at a speed that substantially compressed the time window she needed to get the navigation exactly right.
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## The Ship’s Log
One of the specific practices Tami Oldham Ashcraft maintained throughout the 41 days was keeping a daily ship’s log.
In ordinary offshore sailing, a ship’s log is both a navigational record — position, course, speed, weather conditions, notable events — and a legal document. If a vessel is damaged or lost, the log provides evidence of what happened and when. It is a practice that connects contemporary sailors to centuries of maritime tradition; the logs of vessels from the age of exploration survive in archives and have been used by historians to reconstruct passages and weather events.
For Ashcraft, the log served both its practical functions — position records, navigation calculations, notes on the vessel’s condition — and a psychological one. The act of writing down the day’s events imposed structure on time that might otherwise have dissolved into undifferentiated endurance. Each entry was an acknowledgment that time was passing, that something was happening, that there was a record being made of an experience that mattered enough to record.
She was writing the log, in part, for people who might find it without her. If the Hazana were eventually found as a derelict, the log would tell whoever found it what had happened to the vessel and to its crew. It was an act of communication with an uncertain future audience — a message in a bottle with more specific content. The knowledge that she might not survive and that the log might be her last communication sharpened the quality of attention she brought to it.