The sextant she used was a standard marine sextant. Properly calibrated and used by a competent navigator, it can determine latitude to within a mile or two and longitude — with accurate time — to within similar precision. The accuracy is sufficient to find a large island chain. It is not sufficient to identify a specific harbor entrance; that last-mile navigation requires visual reference, which Ashcraft had in the form of the approach to Hawaii.
That she was able to maintain the precision required, in her condition, with no one to verify her calculations, over 41 days, is the navigational achievement at the core of the story. Everything else — the jury rig, the rationing, the pumping — enabled her survival long enough for the navigation to bring her home. The navigation is what turned survival into arrival.
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## What the Memoir Gave Her
Tami Oldham Ashcraft’s memoir, *Red Sky in Mourning* — published as *Adrift* in some markets — was first self-published in 1998, fifteen years after the events it describes. It was later published by Hyperion in 2002. It has been translated into eight languages and published in fifteen countries.
The memoir gave Ashcraft several things.
It gave her a structure for the experience. The narrative arc of a book — beginning, middle, end; cause and effect; the shape of a life before and after a defining event — imposes on chaotic experience the form that makes it communicable. Writing the memoir required her to establish the sequence of events, to be specific about what she could and could not remember, to distinguish between what she knew and what she inferred. That process is, in itself, a form of making sense.