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## The Three Months Before
The months before the Tahiti departure — the period in which Tami Oldham met Richard Sharp, sailed with him through the South Pacific, and agreed to make the Hazana delivery with him — are worth examining because they establish who she was when Hurricane Raymond hit, and why that mattered.
She was 23 years old. She had been sailing since her mid-teens, had made offshore passages, and had accumulated the kind of practical experience that separates recreational sailors from those who can function competently in demanding conditions. She was not a trained navigator in the professional maritime sense; she was a sailor who had learned celestial navigation as one of the skills of offshore sailing, practiced it on passages, and understood its principles.
Richard Sharp had offered her a different kind of offshore life. His boat, the Mayaluga, was his home; the offshore sailing world was his world. For a young woman who had come to sailing on the West Coast and wanted to go further — wanted the deep ocean, the long passages, the specific way of life that serious offshore sailing provides — Sharp was a guide into that world and a partner in it. The South Pacific passages they made together on the Mayaluga were the kind of formative experiences that make sailors out of people who might otherwise have remained coastal cruisers.
By the time they left Papeete Harbor on September 22, 1983, she had accumulated offshore experience that placed her significantly beyond the average sailor of her age. She had Sharp’s experience and judgment available to supplement her own. The Hazana delivery was a professional engagement, not an adventure; they were capable people doing a known kind of work in conditions they had assessed.