I recently watched the movie Adrift, starring Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin. It’s a beautiful movie with a shocking twist ending, although the most shocking part is that it is actually based on a real story.
Tami Oldham was an adventurous soul and spent her life traveling. She met her fiancé, Richard Sharp, while they were both working in South Africa. Their love blossomed quickly and soon after they made a plan to sail around the world together. Unfortunately, this never happened as Richard got an offer to sail the Hazana, a 44-foot yacht belonging to a wealthy couple, from Tahiti to San Diego. The journey would be over 4,000 miles and would take more than a month, but Richard and Tami accepted the challenge. While they were both experienced sailors, Tammi had never been at sea that long. In the middle of October 1983, 3 weeks into their voyage, a big storm hit.
Hurricane Raymond, a category 4 storm known to be one of the worst to ever hit the Pacific Ocean
Trying to outrun it by going north, they battled waves over 40 feet high, but sadly they ended up being caught right in the middle of it. Richard sent Tami below deck to keep her safe while he tied himself to a tether line and stayed on deck to ride out the storm. The yacht capsized and Richard went overboard, never to be seen again. Tami was unconscious for 27 hours, and when she woke up she found his safety line hanging over the edge of the boat.
20 years later she wrote a book called Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea. She says she had always wanted to write about her experience, but it took her years to work through her trauma. It also took her 6 years to read another book as she was left unable to read after getting a severe head injury during the crash. In the book, she describes talking to someone after waking up from the boat capsizing, like an ‘inner voice”. However, in the movie, Tammi hallucinates seeing Richard. She cares for him for 6 weeks while using whatever food and water they have left, but in the end she faces the grim reality that he won’t survive. When she realizes she needs to use the last rations on herself, it becomes clear that Richard is only a hallucination.
Tami used a sextant, which is a navigational tool that measures the angle of the sun, to find her way home. She was alone at sea for 41 days before a Japanese boat off the coast of Hawaii saw her and picked her up.
