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## What 50,000 Miles Means
The figure of 50,000 offshore miles that Tami Oldham Ashcraft has accumulated since 1983 is not a decoration on the story. It is part of what the story is.
Fifty thousand nautical miles is approximately twice the circumference of the earth. In terms of sailing, it represents many hundreds of days at sea, across many passages, in a variety of ocean conditions. It represents the professional credential of the 100-ton USCG captain’s license and the accumulated experience that license reflects. It represents a specific relationship with the ocean — one that has continued, unbroken by what happened in October 1983, across four decades.
The choice to return to sea after the events of 1983 was not forced. Ashcraft could have made a different choice: to stay on land, to pursue a career in something unrelated to sailing, to let the ocean be a part of her past rather than her present. Many people who experience a severe trauma in a specific context avoid that context afterward; the avoidance is a recognized aspect of post-traumatic stress response.
She did not avoid it. She went back. The 6-month voyage through Fiji came relatively quickly after the events of 1983; by that point she had not fully processed what had happened, and yet she was at sea again, accumulating miles, maintaining the relationship with the ocean that had been part of her life since her mid-teens.
The relationship between survival and return in Ashcraft’s case raises a question that the memoir and subsequent accounts do not fully answer: what is the ocean to her now, after everything? The sextant pendant is one answer: it is an instrument that brought her home, and she wears its shape as a talisman. The continued sailing is another answer: the ocean is not the enemy that took Richard Sharp; it is the element in which she is most competent, most herself, most alive. These two answers are not contradictory.