She still sails. This is the last and most direct fact about Tami Oldham Ashcraft’s relationship with the Pacific, with the sextant, with the experience of October and November 1983. After 40-plus years, after the memoir and the film and the thousands of interviews and profiles, after the losses and the recoveries, she is still on the water.
The ocean took Richard Sharp. It also gave her 50,000 more miles and a home on an island and a pendant that reminds her every day of how she got there. Both things are true. She carries them both, and she keeps sailing.
## The October That Defined Her
October 1983 is a month that most people who lived through it do not remember as remarkable. The world had other concerns: the Soviet Union and the United States were in the late years of the Cold War; the economy was recovering from the recession of the early 1980s; popular culture was doing what popular culture does. The Eastern Pacific was generating an above-average hurricane season as a consequence of the previous year’s El Nino event, but this was a meteorological fact of interest primarily to forecasters and sailors.
For Tami Oldham Ashcraft, October 1983 is the month that divided her life into before and after. The 23-year-old who left Papeete Harbor on September 22 had a life she was building with a man she planned to marry, in a world of offshore sailing she had chosen deliberately and inhabited happily. The 23-year-old who arrived in Hilo Harbor on November 22 had a different life: one defined by loss, by the knowledge of what she was capable of surviving, and by the specific experiences of 41 days alone in the Pacific that she would spend the following decades understanding.