Adrift at sea for 41 days: woman’s ordeal after fiancé washes overboard
A storm washed her fiancé overboard from the yacht they were sailing – and Tami Oldham Ashcraft spent the next 41 days adrift and alone, convinced she was going to die. A new film tells her gripping story
IT WAS an offer too good to pass up. Taking a luxury yacht from Tahiti in French Polynesia to San Diego in America, a voyage of some 6 500km across the glistening waters of the Pacific, was the chance of a lifetime for two avid young sailors. And the task seemed as simple as it was pleasurable: sail the 13m Hazana to her winter berth in California on behalf of her well-heeled owners.
Yet the reality for American sailor Tami Oldham Ashcraft and her British fiancé, Richard Sharp, could barely have proved more catastrophic – as the course they set put them directly into the path of Hurricane Raymond, one of the most destructive storms in recorded history.
With winds of 140 knots and towering 12m waves, Raymond struck them with the force of a wrecking ball, flipping the vessel over, washing Richard overboard and leaving Tami alone aboard the devastated craft. The mast was broken, the sails in shreds and the boat itself flooded.
What followed was a story of good fortune, rare courage and redemption. For more than 40 days, with her boat crippled, equipment smashed and heart broken, 23-year-old Tami somehow endured the elements threatening to annihilate her, and then conquered them.
And she did so thanks to the guiding spirit of her dead fiancé, whose insistent voice, day by day, urged her on to a seemingly impossible survival.
That voice, she says, brought her back from the brink, helping her to navigate with just a sextant and the stars above her head.
Now her 1983 ordeal has been made into a big-budget Hollywood film, Adrift, which hits movie screens this month featuring British actor Sam Claflin as Richard and US actress Shailene Woodley as Tami.
Both are rising stars – Sam appeared in the film adaptation of Jojo Moyes’ novel Me Before You, while Shailene played a teenage cancer patient in the film based on John’s Green’s The Fault in Our Stars – and Adrift looks set to be one of this year’s major cinematic hits.
Yet as dramatic as the movie is, it doesn’t come close to capturing the horror of Tami’s 2 400km solo epic she describes so vividly in Red Sky in Mourning:
A True Story of Love, Loss and Survival at Sea, her memoir on which the movie is based.
THE two young sailors set off in September 1983 on what they imagined to be a routine delivery for the Hazana’s British owners, Peter and Christine Compton. At 34, Richard was more than a decade older than his young American lover, but with his lapis lazuli eyes, golden hair and “exotic” English accent, he meant everything to her. They’d already spent a year and a half together on the Pacific, delivering and mending boats.
True, the distance involved in this new mission was vast, yet the pair had few concerns. “I’d been sailing blue water for four years,” Tami explained in an interview after her harrowing ordeal. “Together we had 50 000 miles [more than 80 000km) of ocean sailing under our belts. We hugged, laughed, made love and relaxed into 20 days of paradise.”
A disastrous reality was less than two weeks away – in the shape of tropical storm Raymond, which “tore out of the blue”, hit hurricane force then held its peak intensity for two catastrophic days.
It was Richard who spotted a monster wave approaching the Hazana and ordered Tami below deck while he secured himself with a safety harness and tried to keep the vessel afloat.
Moments later she heard him scream “Oh my God!” and her world was thrust into darkness.
Tossed like a cork on the raging ocean,
Moments later she heard him scream and her world was thrust into darkness
the yacht had flipped end over end. It was 27 hours before Tami regained consciousness to an eerie silence and utter devastation. The cabin was half-filled with water, everything inside it smashed or scattered on the floor.
Scrambling out onto the deck she looked desperately for Richard but found only wreckage. The boat was all but destroyed – the masts were broken off and the waterlogged sails floated uselessly in the water.
Richard’s safety line dangled ominously off the boat. Tami shouted his name over and over again, but found only an empty ocean. Richard was nowhere to be seen.
Overwhelmed with grief and shock, she was initially paralysed, unable to comprehend the truth. A serious head injury and blood loss meant she drifted in and out of consciousness.
On the verge of a mental breakdown, catatonic, she failed to move or eat, her life seemingly at an end as she explained movingly in her memoir: “I know in a blinding flash he’s gone overboard. Snatched by the boiling cauldron of the ocean, whipped to a frenzy by the hurricane. When I realised he wasn’t there, I wanted to die.
“From the depths of my soul, I feel an animal roar inside me. I scream and rage at the vast sea that’s torn my man from me . . . I slip in and out of consciousness, delirious, half-dead.”
Briefly, she contemplated joining her fiancé in the depths of the now calm water. And it was then that the miracle took place: a voice in her head demanded she bail water out the boat to prevent it from sinking. Confused, Tami at first feared she might have brain damage, yet the voice – sometimes Richard’s, sometimes her own, sometimes her parents’ – was persistent. It urged her to get up, to eat and to make a plan to get to land.
Faint and dizzy, she tried to resist its demands before suddenly snapping to, as she explained, reliving the moment a few years later: “Virtually everything has been swept overboard. Then I see it, floating in front of me. A jar of peanut butter. I grab it, yank the lid off, scoop out a mouthful. It sticks to my tongue like a slug to concrete. I force it down. I need food, I must get my brain and body functioning.”
AND so the days went by with the voice as her only companion on the lonely waters. Tami found the boat’s canned rations amid the wreckage and calculated she could make them last for up to 40 days before starvation would set in. Then she turned her attention to creating a sail.
The original was shredded and the mast broken, but there was a heavy-duty sail still rolled up in its cover.
Although Tami was still struggling with the head injury, she managed to attach the sail to a broken pole and raise it.
At just more than 4m² it was small – but it was enough. A second important victory.
By day nine of her ordeal, Tami could both sail and steer, and briefly allowed herself a degree of hope. Grief was, for now, pushed aside.
She rationed her water supply with life-saving discipline, taking only a few sips a day from the storage bag that supplied the shower. She also found some beer and – incongruously – Cuban cigars, which became her nightly treats.
Tami had no electronic navigation, just an old-fashioned sextant, some waterlogged charts and the sun and the stars as she made for the safety of distant Hawaii.
At times it became overwhelming, particularly when the wind and rain returned to lash the boat on day 11. Still, the forceful inner voice kept pulling her back to sanity. Stay the course, it said. “Fight for your life.”
At other times she heard her mother or father, or her own voice. Sometimes, the voice yelled at her so loudly she jumped.
Twice – on day 16 and then day 34 – she came within moments of rescue when a ship appeared on the horizon. But they failed to see her distress flares or the red T-shirt that she waved desperately at the end of an oar.
Twice, too, a plane flew overhead, but again she wasn’t spotted.
At one point she was so near Hawaii she thought she might have overshot the islands and was beginning to drift towards China – a terrifying possibility.
In her absolute solitude Tami pondered whether she was already dead;
whether she’d become impossible to see, and the thought drove her close to ending her life.
She loaded her rifle and put the muzzle in her mouth, but the thought of never seeing her little brother grow up made her think again.
It was just as well. For it was soon afterwards, on day 40, that Hilo Harbour on Hawaii – and salvation – came into view.
It was nightfall and a perilous coral reef stood between her and safety so, unable to risk going in until daylight, she endured one more agonising night before dawn broke and a rescue vessel sailed out from port to guide her home.
It was time to contemplate her loss, yet Tami’s inner spirit once again counselled her to take courage. Few others would’ve survived the extraordinary voyage, it said. She should feel joy and pride. Then it finally concluded, “I’ll always be with you.”
It was the last time she’d hear the voice that had truly saved her life.
TAMI arrived on land triumphant but looking like a wild woman. It took three hairdressers two days to untangle her matted long blonde hair – which she was determined to keep long. “I’d lost everything, so there was no way I was going to give up my hair,” she later recalled.
Tami returned to the USA and was reunited with her family. Finding herself among other people once again reignited the grief she’d buried in order to survive. Recovery was long and emotionally traumatic.
“While I was in survival mode, the grief was fairly low. It wasn’t as intense as when I got to shore and the survival was over, and I could see people together and everything kept reminding me of him. I just really had a hard time,” she recalled. “There were times I didn’t even want to live anymore because I didn’t know how I was going to go on. I was never going to fall in love again. But that survival instinct [while at sea] just kicked in. It helped me to focus, to keep myself on track.”
It was some time before she found the courage to sail again but today she’s a licensed captain capable of sailing 100-ton vessels, and she has more than 80 000 offshore kilometres under her belt.
But the mental scars took longer to heal. Tami believes she suffered from severe
‘I needed guidance and the voice was a real phenomenon. Three times it was audible externally’
post-traumatic shock, and regrets not seeking treatment or counselling.
“No one ever suggested it [counselling],” she said later, “But I really wish I’d taken the time to do that. I’m fairly headstrong and thought ‘Oh, I can get through this on my own.’ Now, looking back, at times I really needed some professional help.”
Writing Red Sky in Mourning, the memoir that formed the basis for the film, was part of her recovery.
Her serious head injuries meant that it was six years before she was capable of reading a book again, let alone writing one, and it was only after marriage and her first child that she finally felt able to tell her story.
“I’ve always wanted to write my story, but it took me years to move on from being totally consumed by it,” she explains. “I held so much of this in for so long. I just put it on the back burner. I grieved for so long, and I just wanted to erase it from my mind and move on.
“I’d always wanted to write it. I couldn’t believe how much I was still holding around in my head, and just purging it like that really helped me to get past it all. Now I choose when to think about it, instead of it being always there.”
To this day she wears a triangular pendant in the shape of a sextant, encrusted with a diamond. She says it reminds her of how she got home. “It saved my life.”
And so did the mysterious voice that guided her back to shore.
While some have asked whether it was the voice of God, Tami believes it was her inner strength; her own “inner voice”.
“I was mentally fried,” she says. “I needed guidance and the voice was a real phenomenon. Three times it was audible externally. I’ve asked the voice to come back but I never heard from it again.”
She still remembers the advice it had for her when she was at her lowest.
“If I was going to live, let’s get to living” it told her.
It’s a motto she continues to live by.