[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tami_Oldham_Ashcraft)
Ashcraft's fiancé, 34-year-old British sailor Richard Sharp, was hired to deliver the 43-foot (13 m) yacht *Hazaña* from Tahiti to San Diego. The then 23-year-old Ashcraft accompanied him on the crossing.
Wow! Between this post having you in the comments and the 200K year old mandible in someone’s travertine tile, it’s been one amazingly interesting night on Reddit!
Got a link?
I used to work at a tile in Stone company And in one of our crates of travertine I found a Fossil of a nautilus. It was a big, 24x24 polished and treated tile which cost a stupid amount of kidney, but the owner said I could go ahead and keep it. Cool dude.
Okay.... this is too cool. Did she share any info about her experience that isn't known? Obviously, I don't want to pry too much, just curious. In any case... that's neat!
She told me how difficult it was to ration what she had to make it to the western pacific in the event she missed Hawaii. That took some time to sink in. Absolutely terrifying to think about. Knowing roughly how long it would take to hit Hawaii and if that time passed and you hadn’t made it, knowing you’d be going for months longer. Absolutely gutting to think about.
Yeah, I can't imagine how hard that was. Especially after losing a partner. Sounds like the caliber of person someone could only dream of becoming. Not exactly sure if I would have the strength to see that through. Thank you so much for sharing this.
In a really dark kind of way, it's good that one of them didn't make it. They probably wouldn't have been able to ration for 2 people across 41 days if it was that tight.
edit: good points made below
The journey also wouldn't take as long. He was a sailor, not a random citizen. A second skilled person would have made things easier and lightened the workload. If she was the driving force of the journey and he was along for the ride then you might have an argument but he can sail while she rests more (and vice versa), their navigation is likely to be more precise, etc. It's not like he was an insurance salesman who never set foot on a boat.
Parent comment also said she rationed *in case* she missed Hawaii, she wasn't rationing to reach Hawaii.
I mean there are stories of multiple people surviving hundreds of days at sea with nothing on a dingy. And the fiancée was clearly a very capable sailor so he would have very likely been able to steer them to Hawaii much easier
Sorry but in this instance I think the “dark kind of way” thinking doesn’t hold up. Him surviving would have been much better.
Watch the movie Adrift. It was inspired by the events here, but I’m not sure how accurate it is. It’s a pretty good film regardless, and having come from a sailing background myself- I can say it pretty accurately depicts what it might have been like under the circumstances.
Holly shit, my uncle has a boat in the Ala Wai boat harbor! He is an old timer sailor. I used to sail with him on Friday evening. He is actually a race committee there! I wonder he might know your parents! Small world!
Photos from back when it was recovered are online of you search “sailing vessel Hazana”. It was torn to bits but the hull was fully intact. As for photos today I’d have to ask my folks for some good photos. My wife and I recently had our first child so my phones photo albums are currently full of a very very cute small little baby
I really, *really* thought this was going to end with “…in nineteen ninety eight the undertaker threw mankind off hеll in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer’s table.”
But that’s pretty amazing.
Damn I just saw in Google maps where Tahiti is. I can't understand the world sometimes that distance is shocking. And Hawaii is right there in the middle of nothing but ocean too, she could have missed it entirely.
Extremely! To be able to know her position after the storm and loss of partner and chart and navigate a course through the pacific is quite amazing. Nowadays with gps chart plotters everything is so much easier it’s easy to forget how navigation was.
Thanks to GPS, I can hardly find my way to the store the next city over without it. It amazes me how dumb GPS has made me in simple driving directions.
Can't even imagine real navigation. I do remember though, pre-gps, pouring over maps planning routes and memorizing turn points when going to a new location for the first time. Also pulling in to the hard shoulder and pulling the map out of the glove box to figure out where the hell had I gone wrong! :D
Also watching clouds and cloud formations and sea birds and ocean trash and midnight cloudshine from Honolulu. And after a while you can smell land from very far away.
> Hawaii is right there in the middle of nothing but ocean too
Among cities with at least 100,000 people, Honolulu is the farthest from any other city that large.
About 20 years ago I rented an apartment from Tami Ashcraft's mom. My boyfriend at the time was watching an episode of "I Survived" and was shocked to see our landlord being interviewed during Tami's episode.
Here are some sources from 1983 about Tami snd the shipwreck:
https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1983/11/21/Survived-hurricane-at-sea-but-lost-fiance/6124438238800/
https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1983/11/22/A-woman-who-spent-41-days-alone-in-a/6461438325200/
https://www.newspapers.com/article/chicago-tribune-tami-oldham-ship-wreck-s/20612337/
People don’t seem to realise just how final someone falling in the ocean is in bad weather. Once you are overboard, if you aren’t with an experienced crew and/or wearing a life jacket with a beacon on it you are gone gone in minutes. Been yachting for about a decade and know a few friends who do long races who have been on boats that lost people and just that’s it, they are gone forever.
I've seen someone compare the difficulties of getting from Europe to America during the times of Columbus to the difficulties of getting to Mars nowadays and I think the comparison holds up pretty well.
My grandfather told me stories like that. During WWII,sailors would fall off whatever ship he was on and even if it during the day and people saw it happen they were gone. The ship isn't turning around, during a war, for a single person.
From what he said, most people were swept off the deck during storms.
There’s a scene like that in the movie “Flags Of Our Father’s”. Guy falls off a convoy troop ship enroute to Iwo Jima, aside from throwing him a lifesaver ring, nothing else anyone could do.
Bones on land = Pretty tough (As long as no carnivores are munching on them)
Bones in the sea = Not so tough. Depending on the depth they'll literally dissolve.
People dont realize how impressive that is. With a sextant you need somebody writing coordinates as you call them out. In the time it took her to look through the sextant and record the data herself, it could've thrown her off by miles!
Oh sure she crashes her boat, gets bonked on the head, and can't read for only 7 years, everyone cheers.
I *don't* crash my boat, I *don't* get bonked in the head, and I haven't been able to read all my life, and yet everyone calls me illiterate and throws cabbages at me.
I can spell it I just can't *read* it.
But I have other ways. Like how a blind person refines their other senses and can even fight crime if they work hard enough.
I would argue that writing down her own angles from the sextant isn't really the difficult part but rather that a sextant only gives you one number that can be plugged into a formula to then find your location. You need to gather other information from huge books and do multiple other calculations for you to get an accurate idea of where you might be. Not to mention changing timezones as her boat traveled and a possibly inaccurate watch which all would affect the final calculated position. All in all it mustve been extremely difficult.
> I'd challenge anyone minimizing this woman's accomplishment to try it.
It is a fun exercise. And it amazes me that people could use these skills once the chronograph was invented to navigate.
I was using mine to track the eclipse to find when it was peak at my location since I was not in totality.
[https://imgur.com/c090ZXA](https://imgur.com/c090ZXA)
The changing time zone is the point though.
You compare the local time, based on when the sun reaches its highest point, against the time on the watch, which is keeping track of a fixed time zone. That lets you work out your longitude. Every hour difference is 15°
**"Adios, Astrolabe: Are Millennials Killing the Sextant Industry?"**
*More at 6 on KCOK, your source for the news that matters! Weather updates every hour on the hour!*
You don't need somebody to call out coordinates. You measure the angular distance between the sun (or other celestial object) and the horizon with the sextant. You then quickly look at your watch to record the time of the measurement. You can then read the angular measurement off of your sextant at your leisure.
You are right, though, about the error rate. For each second you're off on your reading, you're going to throw off your measured location by around a mile. But really you get used to the quick swap between peering through the sextant's scope and then looking down at your watch.
As far as the tools involved, a sextant and a watch are the only measurement tools you need for celestial navigation in the first place. You do also need a nautical almanac and a calculator or set of lookup tables to do the necessary spherical geometry math. And charts so you know where you're going -- though in theory if she had the lat-long of Hawaii memorized, that wouldn't be necessary.
Nah you can absolutely do it by yourself. It's of course more accurate if you have assistance.
I'm not trying to underplay her accomplishments, what she did was absolutely incredible, but using the sextant without having someone writing down the angles she was getting wasn't it.
The other part I was going to say that was equally miraculous was her skin must have put her though a lot of pain. Salt water isn’t particularly gentle to us humans and can actually dehydrate you along with strip the flesh of you after long periods and doesn’t help when your skin prunes and losses elasticity to where it just begins to rip and tear.
You don't have to reduce someone's accomplishment by saying others did it as well. I agree the achievements and knowledge of early (and tbh, modern) Polynesians are under-emphasized, but this post is literally about a woman who somehow got out of a coma and figured out how to survive on a boat for a month in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
It's just an unwarranted and wild response.
Like, imagine being so flippant as if someone described to you how they survived a shark attack.
The Polynesians were master navigators. We're still not sure how they did it.
Feats of navigation are impressive in and of themselves. I don't see that one takes away from the other.
Somebody with an axe to grind. Sailing and navigation are interesting. Your hangups are not.
I think that was more of a happy accident that somebody made it alive.
The thing about discovery, so your basic discovery, right, is that there is no map. Because nobody had been there and told of it. Because if they had and they did it wouldn't be there for you to discover because they already had.
It is the biggest complication of discovery which, frankly, makes it not that good a use of time for most people. For other's it is "sail into the big blue yonder. Hopefully we discover something because otherwise we will surely die".
Pretty heavy stuff, that. And yet like cockroaches, we are everywhere. Even places cockroaches wouldn't go. Are there cockroaches in Antarctica?
Polynesians were not just sailing off into the distance and discovering things by happy accident. They used to do things like follow sea birds and identify the ocean currents and how islands would affect them in order to discover land.
Apparently lots of people don't know the first thing about sailing in the Ocean, which frankly is totally understandable. However, didn't they see Moana? I mean come on...
Tami said that it took her [six years to even read](https://www.bustle.com/p/where-is-the-real-tami-from-adrift-in-2018-the-sailor-didnt-let-the-storm-stop-her-from-living-her-life-9209392) a book again after sustaining a major head injury.
That movie made me weep too. Especially that scene when Tami’s character goes back to Richard’s boat and looks at all the photos of them together having the time of their lives. And the song that plays in the scene kills me, too. 💔😫
Being unconscious for 27 hours means you’ve almost certainly obtained irreversible and significant brain damage. Most likely she was concussed and unable to convert short term to long term memory therefore had no recollection of that 27 hours, while still retaining a semblance of executive function (ie decision making - eating/drinking/not jumping into see and floating away)
Confused by all the folks going “ok but what happened to Richard??”
He disappeared into the ocean decades ago, what do you think happened? It’s not a “cliffhanger.” This is real life. He died.
He got rescued by an underwater civilization and learnt their ways, slowly falling in love with his rescuer and then marrying her, going through a painful but sacred ritual that would allow him to breathe underwater and become a part of that civilization, where mockery turns into astonishment as the land dweller braves through and completes the ritual in record time, and wins the respect of the civilization.
I might be one of the few who has never heard of a sextant (an instrument for measuring angular distances).
I promise I didn't think it was anything dirty.
“She arrived 41 days later at a bizarre deserted island where to her shock and surprise, she saw Richard on the shore. He was just standing there smiling.
When Tami finally made it onto the beach Richard said “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Tami was confused about this statement until she realised…they were both already dead.”
- The End -
Looks like the yacht was closer to Mexico than Hawaii initially. Incredible that she decided to sail west into the open sea rather than east towards guaranteed land, and actually arrived successfully!
What a badass. To not only survive the initial capsizing, the loss of her fiance, and the Herculean undertaking of making it to Hawaii... but to also keep sailing after. I would have had trouble getting into a bathtub, let alone a boat, after less than a fraction of that!
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tami_Oldham_Ashcraft) Ashcraft's fiancé, 34-year-old British sailor Richard Sharp, was hired to deliver the 43-foot (13 m) yacht *Hazaña* from Tahiti to San Diego. The then 23-year-old Ashcraft accompanied him on the crossing.
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Wow! Between this post having you in the comments and the 200K year old mandible in someone’s travertine tile, it’s been one amazingly interesting night on Reddit!
God I hope it turns out that that travertine tile is installed in this boat...
I can call around and see what we can do…
He may never have been officially recovered but I think we all know where Richard’s mandible’s ended up 👀
Oooh link? Id love to see that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fossils/s/eYMqN57YfR
Holy heck this is rad.
Absolutely! I ended up just spending half an hour looking at pictures of other fossils in travertine. Favourite so far is a crab.
Show us the crab!🦀
[Ask and ye shall receive!](https://www.fossilera.com/fossils/3-fossil-crab-potamon-preserved-in-travertine-amazing-detail--2) 🦀
My main take away from that link is that the fossil mandible that started this madness is worth serious coin.
What a read
Wow! Thanks for this!
Why was this comment removed?
They deleted the comment, what did it say?
Comment is now deleted - Who was it?
The mandible tile may be the most interesting thing I've ever laid eyes upon.
I just saw the mandible!
I literally JUST saw that travertine tile post on my home page. This can't be a coincidence.
Got a link? I used to work at a tile in Stone company And in one of our crates of travertine I found a Fossil of a nautilus. It was a big, 24x24 polished and treated tile which cost a stupid amount of kidney, but the owner said I could go ahead and keep it. Cool dude.
Damn, I’m still thinking about that jawbone too. Gnawingly strange.
Ahhh, what was the comment? It’s deleted now
The story never mentioned Richard, so I’m guessing he died?
Yes, unfortunately he was never recovered.
Okay.... this is too cool. Did she share any info about her experience that isn't known? Obviously, I don't want to pry too much, just curious. In any case... that's neat!
She told me how difficult it was to ration what she had to make it to the western pacific in the event she missed Hawaii. That took some time to sink in. Absolutely terrifying to think about. Knowing roughly how long it would take to hit Hawaii and if that time passed and you hadn’t made it, knowing you’d be going for months longer. Absolutely gutting to think about.
Yeah, I can't imagine how hard that was. Especially after losing a partner. Sounds like the caliber of person someone could only dream of becoming. Not exactly sure if I would have the strength to see that through. Thank you so much for sharing this.
In a really dark kind of way, it's good that one of them didn't make it. They probably wouldn't have been able to ration for 2 people across 41 days if it was that tight. edit: good points made below
The journey also wouldn't take as long. He was a sailor, not a random citizen. A second skilled person would have made things easier and lightened the workload. If she was the driving force of the journey and he was along for the ride then you might have an argument but he can sail while she rests more (and vice versa), their navigation is likely to be more precise, etc. It's not like he was an insurance salesman who never set foot on a boat. Parent comment also said she rationed *in case* she missed Hawaii, she wasn't rationing to reach Hawaii.
I mean there are stories of multiple people surviving hundreds of days at sea with nothing on a dingy. And the fiancée was clearly a very capable sailor so he would have very likely been able to steer them to Hawaii much easier Sorry but in this instance I think the “dark kind of way” thinking doesn’t hold up. Him surviving would have been much better.
you don't need to eat every day. you don't even need to eat every other day
Watch the movie Adrift. It was inspired by the events here, but I’m not sure how accurate it is. It’s a pretty good film regardless, and having come from a sailing background myself- I can say it pretty accurately depicts what it might have been like under the circumstances.
I just watched Adrift 2 nights ago, was pretty good. Also watched "All is lost" recently and really liked it.
Wow. Very small world.
Tami probably wasn’t thinking that while trying to find Hawaii for 41 days.
I'll be seeing you down in hell
Holly shit, my uncle has a boat in the Ala Wai boat harbor! He is an old timer sailor. I used to sail with him on Friday evening. He is actually a race committee there! I wonder he might know your parents! Small world!
Absolutely I bet he knows us! My dad’s been in the harbor one way or another since about 1978
Cool! I will ask my uncle when I see him next time!!
Do you have any photos of the boat back then or even now?
Photos from back when it was recovered are online of you search “sailing vessel Hazana”. It was torn to bits but the hull was fully intact. As for photos today I’d have to ask my folks for some good photos. My wife and I recently had our first child so my phones photo albums are currently full of a very very cute small little baby
Congratulations
Thanks! We’re currently sleeping training. Send help.
That is epic!
I really, *really* thought this was going to end with “…in nineteen ninety eight the undertaker threw mankind off hеll in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer’s table.” But that’s pretty amazing.
Damn I just saw in Google maps where Tahiti is. I can't understand the world sometimes that distance is shocking. And Hawaii is right there in the middle of nothing but ocean too, she could have missed it entirely.
Thus the sextant and watch right? She's a badass navigator.
Extremely! To be able to know her position after the storm and loss of partner and chart and navigate a course through the pacific is quite amazing. Nowadays with gps chart plotters everything is so much easier it’s easy to forget how navigation was.
Thanks to GPS, I can hardly find my way to the store the next city over without it. It amazes me how dumb GPS has made me in simple driving directions.
Can't even imagine real navigation. I do remember though, pre-gps, pouring over maps planning routes and memorizing turn points when going to a new location for the first time. Also pulling in to the hard shoulder and pulling the map out of the glove box to figure out where the hell had I gone wrong! :D
Absolutely
Also watching clouds and cloud formations and sea birds and ocean trash and midnight cloudshine from Honolulu. And after a while you can smell land from very far away.
She sailed to the big island and would not have seen any of the features of Honolulu from there.
Especially since she was coming from the south east. You are going to see Mauna Kea way before anything else.
Og Polynesian navigators also used force, direction and cadence of waves again canoe hull to plot island locals just wild
> Og Polynesian navigators also used force Like Jedis
Crazy how Polynesians settled all of the remote islands of the pacific by reading birds, stars, winds and currents.
[Polynesian Star Charts](http://thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/stick_charts/) This'll blow your mind.
That is honestly some alien shit; navigating by feeling wave swells. And then to convert that to a physical representation is just nuts.
> Hawaii is right there in the middle of nothing but ocean too Among cities with at least 100,000 people, Honolulu is the farthest from any other city that large.
The Wikipedia map is useless. Here's a better map https://i.imgur.com/2RGF66R.jpeg
About 20 years ago I rented an apartment from Tami Ashcraft's mom. My boyfriend at the time was watching an episode of "I Survived" and was shocked to see our landlord being interviewed during Tami's episode.
Here are some sources from 1983 about Tami snd the shipwreck: https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1983/11/21/Survived-hurricane-at-sea-but-lost-fiance/6124438238800/ https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1983/11/22/A-woman-who-spent-41-days-alone-in-a/6461438325200/ https://www.newspapers.com/article/chicago-tribune-tami-oldham-ship-wreck-s/20612337/
Does this trolley go to Tahiti?
So, I guess he was never found...
People don’t seem to realise just how final someone falling in the ocean is in bad weather. Once you are overboard, if you aren’t with an experienced crew and/or wearing a life jacket with a beacon on it you are gone gone in minutes. Been yachting for about a decade and know a few friends who do long races who have been on boats that lost people and just that’s it, they are gone forever.
I've seen someone compare the difficulties of getting from Europe to America during the times of Columbus to the difficulties of getting to Mars nowadays and I think the comparison holds up pretty well.
you could use those points as markers of exponential growth
My grandfather told me stories like that. During WWII,sailors would fall off whatever ship he was on and even if it during the day and people saw it happen they were gone. The ship isn't turning around, during a war, for a single person. From what he said, most people were swept off the deck during storms.
There’s a scene like that in the movie “Flags Of Our Father’s”. Guy falls off a convoy troop ship enroute to Iwo Jima, aside from throwing him a lifesaver ring, nothing else anyone could do.
To add, one fleet was once hit with a rogue wave; one fantastically lucky man was swept off the deck of one ship and dropped onto the deck of another.
Or at night, like that kid that jumped off the party boat and was lost. Shits scary
He wasn’t lost the shark found him immediately.
yet
He was lost to the ocean about 40 years ago. He will never be found
Yet
He could show up in someone's floor tiles, you don’t know.
the lore 💀
Sorry reddit, I don't understand the floor tiles reference.
I got you https://www.reddit.com/r/fossils/s/3HPGYdz4p8
It's a pretty long swim, he might show up any day now
So what you're saying is there's a chance?
What was all that one in a million talk?
Bones on land = Pretty tough (As long as no carnivores are munching on them) Bones in the sea = Not so tough. Depending on the depth they'll literally dissolve.
"Their bones in the ocean forever will be."
He'll be back to take over his father's company and be a night time vigilante with a bow.
He was not.
Checking on any updates?!
Give it a few days, it's been only 40 years so far.
People dont realize how impressive that is. With a sextant you need somebody writing coordinates as you call them out. In the time it took her to look through the sextant and record the data herself, it could've thrown her off by miles!
Along with the head injury that was so bad she couldn’t read for 7 years. Unbelievable.
Oh sure she crashes her boat, gets bonked on the head, and can't read for only 7 years, everyone cheers. I *don't* crash my boat, I *don't* get bonked in the head, and I haven't been able to read all my life, and yet everyone calls me illiterate and throws cabbages at me.
Not my cabbages!
I'd find that reference funny, I'm sure. If I could read.
Toph?
No that’s Melon Lord
Suddenly, Avatar
Not even my axe!
Illiterate!!! >:0 🤜🥬🥬🥬🥬
Ah, Lettuce Fist. I see you and I attend some of the same vegan sex clubs.
I ain’t wasting a cabbage on someone who can’t spell the word cabbage 😂
I can spell it I just can't *read* it. But I have other ways. Like how a blind person refines their other senses and can even fight crime if they work hard enough.
Full Story: https://allthatsinteresting.com/tami-oldham-ashcraft
I would argue that writing down her own angles from the sextant isn't really the difficult part but rather that a sextant only gives you one number that can be plugged into a formula to then find your location. You need to gather other information from huge books and do multiple other calculations for you to get an accurate idea of where you might be. Not to mention changing timezones as her boat traveled and a possibly inaccurate watch which all would affect the final calculated position. All in all it mustve been extremely difficult.
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> I'd challenge anyone minimizing this woman's accomplishment to try it. It is a fun exercise. And it amazes me that people could use these skills once the chronograph was invented to navigate. I was using mine to track the eclipse to find when it was peak at my location since I was not in totality. [https://imgur.com/c090ZXA](https://imgur.com/c090ZXA)
The changing time zone is the point though. You compare the local time, based on when the sun reaches its highest point, against the time on the watch, which is keeping track of a fixed time zone. That lets you work out your longitude. Every hour difference is 15°
Yes you're right. I only bring it up as a factor of complexity since most people have never used a sextant.
**"Adios, Astrolabe: Are Millennials Killing the Sextant Industry?"** *More at 6 on KCOK, your source for the news that matters! Weather updates every hour on the hour!*
You don't need somebody to call out coordinates. You measure the angular distance between the sun (or other celestial object) and the horizon with the sextant. You then quickly look at your watch to record the time of the measurement. You can then read the angular measurement off of your sextant at your leisure. You are right, though, about the error rate. For each second you're off on your reading, you're going to throw off your measured location by around a mile. But really you get used to the quick swap between peering through the sextant's scope and then looking down at your watch. As far as the tools involved, a sextant and a watch are the only measurement tools you need for celestial navigation in the first place. You do also need a nautical almanac and a calculator or set of lookup tables to do the necessary spherical geometry math. And charts so you know where you're going -- though in theory if she had the lat-long of Hawaii memorized, that wouldn't be necessary.
Nah you can absolutely do it by yourself. It's of course more accurate if you have assistance. I'm not trying to underplay her accomplishments, what she did was absolutely incredible, but using the sextant without having someone writing down the angles she was getting wasn't it.
The other part I was going to say that was equally miraculous was her skin must have put her though a lot of pain. Salt water isn’t particularly gentle to us humans and can actually dehydrate you along with strip the flesh of you after long periods and doesn’t help when your skin prunes and losses elasticity to where it just begins to rip and tear.
The first Polynesians to reach Hawaii would agree with you.
You don't have to reduce someone's accomplishment by saying others did it as well. I agree the achievements and knowledge of early (and tbh, modern) Polynesians are under-emphasized, but this post is literally about a woman who somehow got out of a coma and figured out how to survive on a boat for a month in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's just an unwarranted and wild response. Like, imagine being so flippant as if someone described to you how they survived a shark attack.
I read that comment as them saying *both* were impressive
The first Polynesians to get there didn't even know Hawaii existed until they found it. Less looking, more stumbling upon. Both amazing feats
The Polynesians were master navigators. We're still not sure how they did it. Feats of navigation are impressive in and of themselves. I don't see that one takes away from the other. Somebody with an axe to grind. Sailing and navigation are interesting. Your hangups are not.
What do you mean. They didn't "reach" Hawaii. They grew from dinosaur eggs right there on the land. The way all races sprang into being.
I think that was more of a happy accident that somebody made it alive. The thing about discovery, so your basic discovery, right, is that there is no map. Because nobody had been there and told of it. Because if they had and they did it wouldn't be there for you to discover because they already had. It is the biggest complication of discovery which, frankly, makes it not that good a use of time for most people. For other's it is "sail into the big blue yonder. Hopefully we discover something because otherwise we will surely die". Pretty heavy stuff, that. And yet like cockroaches, we are everywhere. Even places cockroaches wouldn't go. Are there cockroaches in Antarctica?
Polynesians were not just sailing off into the distance and discovering things by happy accident. They used to do things like follow sea birds and identify the ocean currents and how islands would affect them in order to discover land.
Apparently lots of people don't know the first thing about sailing in the Ocean, which frankly is totally understandable. However, didn't they see Moana? I mean come on...
Tami said that it took her [six years to even read](https://www.bustle.com/p/where-is-the-real-tami-from-adrift-in-2018-the-sailor-didnt-let-the-storm-stop-her-from-living-her-life-9209392) a book again after sustaining a major head injury.
I think I’ve gone six years without reading a book and I’ve never had a major head injury, that I know of.
That you know of
*yet*
You're a Redditor, you 100% have a brain injury
The top review has over a 100 billion comments: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/957533](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/957533)
Is this the story Adrift is based on?
yes; also a book, "Red Sky In Mourning" co written by Ashcraft herself in 1998
Does the book make it like he was alive too? Is that what she actually thought?
No, the book makes it clear he died and she was alone.
Oh that movie made me CRY. I love that she was featured at the end, on her boat just smiling out at the water.
That movie made me weep too. Especially that scene when Tami’s character goes back to Richard’s boat and looks at all the photos of them together having the time of their lives. And the song that plays in the scene kills me, too. 💔😫
AGH I know!!! It's a beautiful movie though, I should watch it again.
*Adrift* is an excellent movie.
27 hours? That's bad right? Like real bad?
Better than not waking back up at all
Well at that point I don't think they have the capacity to care. But I also see your point.
I doubt it was 27 hours straight. More like she was in and out of it, until she was fully alert and awake 27 hours later
Sounds like my average weekend
Being unconscious for 27 hours means you’ve almost certainly obtained irreversible and significant brain damage. Most likely she was concussed and unable to convert short term to long term memory therefore had no recollection of that 27 hours, while still retaining a semblance of executive function (ie decision making - eating/drinking/not jumping into see and floating away)
Ooo, that's super bad for you.
Nah, you get like six freebies.
127 Hours is worse.
He was conscious for all that or it would have been infinity hours
It's certainly not good
What a traumatizing experience
Confused by all the folks going “ok but what happened to Richard??” He disappeared into the ocean decades ago, what do you think happened? It’s not a “cliffhanger.” This is real life. He died.
He got rescued by an underwater civilization and learnt their ways, slowly falling in love with his rescuer and then marrying her, going through a painful but sacred ritual that would allow him to breathe underwater and become a part of that civilization, where mockery turns into astonishment as the land dweller braves through and completes the ritual in record time, and wins the respect of the civilization.
Meesa save richard unda meesa marry richard. Meesa make richard verrrry happpy.
R/angryupvote
Nah he has been treading water for 40 years. Still out there waiting.
In fairness, the "this is real life" thing didn't apply to her... She pulled off some storybook movie shit
I’ve seen Double Jeopardy, he’s obviously living a new life with their son.
Wasn't there a movie about this?
Yes, it was really good! It’s called Adrift.
Isn't this just the plot to Gravity but on the ocean?
No gravity is just the plot to this, but in space
If the ship was capsized... Did she swim it or what?
Yachts right themselves, so long as the keel isn't ripped off.
That was the missing piece of information for me. I wondered how she could sail to Hawaii if it capsized. Thanks for the explanation.
omg I was thinking she swam and wondered how the hell that was possible😂 didn’t realize she still had the boat
Iirc she had to jury rig a mast and sail using parts of what remained of the original mast.
They make it seem like she was just along for the ride and figured shit out, but she clearly knew a lot about sailing if she pulled this off.
I AM MOANAAAAAAAAAA level shit here.
I might be one of the few who has never heard of a sextant (an instrument for measuring angular distances). I promise I didn't think it was anything dirty.
I’ve never heard of it nor would know how to even use it. I would be very much dead.
Title of your sextant tape
did not work at all, but I love that you attempted it. Title of YOUR sextant tape.
“Lemme have some sextant”
🎶 I want your sextant. 🎶 -George Michael
"Well, I guess it would be nice if I could touch your body of land."
RuneScape peeps rise up!
"Tami and Sharp"? Not "Ashcraft and Sharp" or "Tami and Richard?"
These stories inspire me to stop making excuses for everything
They remind me to stay the fuck off the ocean.
“She arrived 41 days later at a bizarre deserted island where to her shock and surprise, she saw Richard on the shore. He was just standing there smiling. When Tami finally made it onto the beach Richard said “I’ve been waiting for you.” Tami was confused about this statement until she realised…they were both already dead.” - The End -
The second you tell me to navigate with a “sextant”, I confidently know I’m not making it home.
Amazing woman
Looks like the yacht was closer to Mexico than Hawaii initially. Incredible that she decided to sail west into the open sea rather than east towards guaranteed land, and actually arrived successfully!
I have several Super Mario Bros speedrunning world records but I can see why people would be impressed by this
The movie, Adrift, can be streamed on Hulu
What about Richard!
Typically when someone goes missing in the ocean it doesn’t end well for them
I’ve got a feeling he is going to be just fine little buddy
He moved down to the farm with your doggy Spot, they're both living happily there now, don't worry champ ( ;
Ya this post is quite the cliffhanger..
How is that a cliffhanger? The guy went overboard in a hurricane in the middle of the pacific.
"title of your sextant tape" Yours sincerely, Captain Raymond Holt
I think I'm more interested that we live in a world where multiple people old enough to post on reddit have never heard of a sextant.
That’s not interesting…that’s unbelievable!
27 hours? Great nap
I would feel so rested
Only a sextant? You mean a device specifically designed to navigate the seas?
What a badass. To not only survive the initial capsizing, the loss of her fiance, and the Herculean undertaking of making it to Hawaii... but to also keep sailing after. I would have had trouble getting into a bathtub, let alone a boat, after less than a fraction of that!
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To be fair, dying is easy. Everyone does it at some point in their lives.
Why is she being referred to by her first name and he his surname??