November 15, 1991
Simi Valley, California, USA
In researching Tami Oldham and the Adrift true story, we discovered that the real-life events depicted in the 2018 movie spanned the months of September, October and November 1983. 23-year-old Tami Oldham and her British fiancé, Richard Sharp (34), had been pleasure sailing his 36-foot sailboat, the Mayaluga, for the previous six months. They made the decision to accept a job delivering a 44-foot yacht, the Hazana, from Tahiti to San Diego where it would be received by a new owner. They had been less than three weeks into their 4,000-mile trip when Hurricane Raymond hit. -Chicago Tribune Top: The real Tami Oldham and fiancé Richard Sharp prior to the trip. Bottom: Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin as Oldham and Sharp in the Adrift 2018 movie.
Yes. Tami and Richard knew a storm was coming, but they didn't know it would be that bad. They tried to outrun Hurricane Raymond by sailing north, battling 140 knot winds and 40-foot waves as they did their best to keep the yacht afloat. The relentless category 4 hurricane showed no signs of calming. It changed direction and stayed on their tail like a predator. -Mirror Online
No. In real life, as they continued to battle Hurricane Raymond on October 12, 1983, Richard Sharp sent his fiancée Tami below deck to rest. He used a safety line to tether himself to the yacht in an attempt to ride out the storm and keep the boat afloat. The yacht capsized and Tami hit her head when she was thrown against the cabin wall. The force of the blow knocked her out, and the last thing she can remember hearing was Sharp screaming, "Oh my God!" She didn't wake up for 27 hours, and when she did, she went above deck and discovered Richard's safety line hanging off the edge of the boat. Her fiancé was lost at sea. She would never see him again. -Chicago Tribune Tami Oldham remained unconscious for 27 hours after hitting her head when the boat capsized during the hurricane. The severe head injury is visible on Shailene Woodley's character in the 2018 movie. At first, the Adrift movie seems to unfold differently than the true story. Tami wakes up and finds an injured Richard floating in the water as he clings to a small overturned lifeboat that had fallen off the yacht. She gets him back to the yacht where she cares for his broken ribs and shattered leg as he reassures her that she can get them home, despite him describing himself as being "dead weight". However, paying close attention to the movie's trailer reveals a couple other clues to the likely reality of this situation. When Tami (Shailene Woodley) and Richard (Sam Claflin) are having dinner on his boat, he talks about the challenge of sailing and says that "you're either sleep deprived or seasick, and after a few days there's the hallucinations." This clue seems to foreshadow things to come. Coupled with Tami's bad head injury sustained during the storm, it's not hard to start wondering if Richard is merely a figment of Tami's imagination. Clues to this are also found in Tami's memoir Red Sky in Mourning . The Adrift movie's ending will undoubtedly reveal the answer. Tami's memoir , originally titled Red Sky in Mourning , provided the basis for the Adrift movie.
Yes. In her book Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea , she talks about hearing a voice, but not that of her lost-at-sea fiancé Richard Sharp. Instead, she described it as an "inner voice" that was audible to her externally three times. It's certainly possible that her head injury and blood loss caused her to believe that she was hearing such a voice. Others believe it was God speaking to her. "I needed guidance and the voice was a real phenomenon," says Tami. "Three times it was audible externally. I've asked the voice to come back, but I never heard from it again. ... The voice kept me on track. I just followed it." -Mirror Online
Yes. The Adrift movie true story reveals that nearly everything on the Hazana (pictured below) was broken and strewn about. The masts had snapped off, and like in the 2018 movie, the sails were waterlogged and floated nearby. The cabin was half-filled with water. The engine and radio were broken. The radio device used to indicate the boat's emergency position was down as well, and the electronic navigation system wasn't functional either. -Mirror Online Top: The real Hazana yacht in 1983 after the ordeal at sea. Bottom: Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin on the movie's version of the yacht. The biggest noticeable difference is the ladder placement.
Fact-checking the Adrift movie reveals that after Hurricane Raymond struck and claimed the life of her fiancé Richard Sharp, Tami Oldham remained stranded at sea on the damaged yacht for 41 days. -Mirror Online
In 2003, she told the Chicago Tribune that she ate canned food and peanut butter, consuming everything from fruit cocktail to sardines.
With the yacht's navigation system broken by the storm, Tami used a sextant to help her find her way home. A sextant is a navigational instrument that can be used to measure the angle of the sun (or another astronomical object) above the horizon. "It saved my life," says Tami. She was then able to work out her latitude using nautical maps. To remember what got her home, Tami wears a triangular-shaped sextant pendant encrusted with a diamond. The only navigational instrument that wasn't broken during the hurricane was a sextant, which measures the angle of the sun (or other astronomical object) above the horizon. It saved her life. Being able to successfully navigate was only part of the challenge; she also needed to keep the yacht afloat and get it moving. She fashioned a pump to prevent the cabin down below from flooding and created a makeshift sail from a broken spinnaker pole and spare storm jib. She eventually managed to get the boat into a position where she could use currents that would hopefully take her to Hawaii. -Mirror Online
No. In the film, we see her using sutures to self-stitch the wound shut. "There were sutures on board," Tami wrote in her book, "but I couldn’t bring myself to sew my head shut." Instead, she drew the long wound together and adhered several large butterfly bandages as pus and blood oozed out.
Yes. Weak, starving, injured, and let down after mistakenly thinking she saw an island on the horizon, at one point during her journey Tami loaded a rifle that was on board and stuck it in her mouth. The internal voice she heard during her journey convinced her to stop. This intense moment is not depicted in the film. While exploring the Tami Oldham true story, we learned that it wasn't the only time her despair had led her to thoughts of suicide. -Mirror Online Tami dealt with years of grief by eventually writing her story down and penning the book Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea . She is pictured on the left more than a decade after the tragedy.
Tami navigated approximately 1,500 miles over a span of 41 days before reaching Hilo, Hawaii. As she approached the harbor, she saw a large ship on its way out. She shot off several flares before the 200+ foot vessel flashed its running lights and altered course. The ship pulled up alongside the Hazana. The crew lowered down coffee and someone tossed her an apple. They towed her inside the reef and a Coast Guard Auxiliary towed her the rest of the way. Similar to the Adrift movie's ending, as she pulled into the Big Island's Hilo Harbor, she cried tears of joy. -Mirror Online The Adrift movie ends similar to the real-life story.
Yes. When the boat capsized, she struck her head so hard that she couldn't read a book for the next six years. The words leapt off the page as she tried to focus on them. -Mirror Online
Yes. The tragedy she endured didn't stop her from continuing to enjoy sailing. She got right back into it. "I just love it," Tami told the Chicago Tribune . "I'm passionate about it. I kind of parallel [the hurricane] to being in a car accident. You get back in the car or, like they say, back on the horse." She went on to become a "100-ton licensed captain with more than 50,000 offshore miles" to her credit. Tami did struggle with grief and nightmares, and she spent the first eight years after the accident unable to heal. When she was able to read again, she began to deal with some of her feelings by writing her story down, eventually penning the book Red Sky in Mourning , which inspired the movie. She self-published the book in 1998, and it was later picked up by Hyperion Press and published widely in 2002. Tami says that she never went to counseling but wishes someone would have suggested it. "I definitely had some severe post-traumatic stress syndrome," she stated. "I really wish I had taken the time to do that." -Chicago Tribune Despite the tragedy, Tami never stopped sailing and became a 100-ton licensed captain. She is pictured here prior to the Adrift movie's 2018 release.
Yes. Ten years after losing fiancé Richard Sharp at sea and surviving the ordeal, Tami met a blue-eyed man at a dance. They married in 1994, had two children, and live on San Juan Island, Washington. Tragically, their 22-year-old daughter, Kelli Ashcraft, was taken from them in 2017 as the result of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.
Dive deeper into the Adrift true story by watching the Tami Oldham Ashcraft movie interview below.
Tami Oldham "Adrift" Interview |
Adrift Movie Trailer |
"It's amazing what you can do when you have to survive," says shipwreck survivor Tami Oldham Ashcraft
Spoiler Alert! This story contains major spoilers about the plot of the new movie Adrift .
The summer of 1983 started out like a fairytale adventure for 23-year-old globetrotter Tami Oldham Ashcraft.
The California native got engaged to her British boyfriend, Richard Sharp, and several months later the two experienced sailors set out on a dream trip from Tahiti to San Diego on a luxurious 44-foot sailboat. Less than two weeks into their trek, the pair — played by Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin in the new movie Adrift — were trapped in a devastatingly strong hurricane that changed their lives forever.
Ashcraft, who originally detailed her ordeal in a 1998 self-published memoir Red Sky in Mourning , says that although she and Sharp received radio warnings about the developing storm, which started out as a tropical depression and quickly gained in intensity and speed, they were unable to outrun it.
“We ran from it for three days trying to figure it out, because it kept changing direction,” Ashcraft recalls to PEOPLE. “The storms are going twice your speed. We couldn’t make that kind of time with the boat to get out of the way.”
When the hurricane fully descended upon them on Oct. 12, Sharp had sent Ashcraft below deck to rest. The last thing she remembers before the boat capsized and she was knocked unconscious is her fiancé screaming.
“When I woke up from being knocked out for 27 hours, I didn’t know where I was,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Where am I?’ The boat’s half-full of water at that point, I couldn’t even really remember anything. Then I started moving and unlatching myself [from her safety suit and various debris], looking around going, ‘Oh my God. Richard. Where’s Richard?'”
All she could find of Sharp in the midst of the wreckage was his broken safety tether hanging lifelessly over the boat. While the reality of her grave situation swept over her, so did the awareness that she was badly injured — her head was split open behind her hairline and she had a serious gash on her leg — and drifting aimlessly somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
“They were both bad. My head injury I could keep clean somewhat, keep bandages on it,” says Ashcraft. “Thank goodness it’s underneath my hairline so you can’t see it. It splayed my head wide open, and I just bled. My leg I kept hitting on everything, and then there was so much water in the boat. It would just stay wet all the time. I was super worried about my leg. Then I started ripping up t-shirts and stuff when I ran out of bandages.”
After she self-administered first aid, Ashcraft’s next key survival move was crafting a makeshift sail from some of the debris on the boat and setting course for Hawaii — 1,500 miles away — which she was able to do via her navigation skills.
“What saved my life was knowing celestial navigation, that I could navigate by the sun and get myself somewhere,” Ashcraft says. “You have to do three sights a day, and sometimes I would have to do four. Doing all the mathematics required for that really helped me to focus.”
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It also helped keep her mind off her grief over losing her fiancé in such a tragic way.
“I had to tell myself onboard that I couldn’t cry anymore, because I was losing way too much water,” Ashcraft says. “My water supply was very limited. I just had a big talk with myself. That inner strength to survive is so strong. You just don’t realize it, until you’re put in a really crucial time that you have to survive. It’s amazing what you can do. That just comes from within really. Then keeping your mind active.”
Ashcraft survived 41 days adrift in the Pacific, subsisting on peanut butter and willpower, before she approached Hilo, Hawaii and was picked up by a Japanese research vessel after sending up a flare around 4 o’clock in the morning.
The ship’s crew members “were shocked,” she recalls. “I was exhausted. I was way underweight — I’m 5’8″-5’9″ and I weighed about 100 lbs. I didn’t even go to the hospital. Can you believe that? I can’t believe nobody sent me to the hospital.”
When Ashcraft returned home to San Diego, the weight of her near-death experience and the loss of her first love fully set in, and she face a long recovery from her injuries, physically and mentally.
“I had the head injury and I couldn’t even read a book for nearly five years. I couldn’t finish sentences, my short term memory was really bad,” she says. “Seeing couples together, that sort of thing, was hard. I had nightmares. I was consumed for years and years with thinking about it. I then realized after five or six years that I could choose when to start thinking about him and the experience. I started realizing, ‘Oh, I’m not consumed by this all day now.'”
Although Ashcraft says her physical injuries healed well enough that she never went to a hospital for medical attention, she regrets not seeking out help from a therapist or counselor.
“I wish I had gotten some professional mental help. I think I could have sped up my recovery a little bit more,” she says. “Not so much the grieving but the mental recovery of reading and that kind of thing. They can give you projects to work on and things, and also just make sure that you’re going around the right track.”
Ashcraft says it took her a full five years before she was able to come out of her mental fog and feel joy again. She returned to the water almost immediately — only these days she prefers power boating to sailing when she navigates near Washington’s San Juan Islands, where she lives with her family, husband Ed, a contractor, and her two daughters.
“We’ve been a boating family,” she says. “I think it teaches the children so much more about life.”
Ashcraft still speaks publicly about her incredible survival story to groups like the Navy Survival School. “I’m glad to help, although I’m sorry I was in that situation. Now I choose when I want to think about it. For many years I was consumed by it and a lot of that had to do with just moving on in life,” she says. “It’s still in your heart. It’s just in a different way.”
Adrift is now playing in theaters.
Water, water everywhere, and not a damn way to get home. That’s this week’s gallery theme: Movies where we see people trapped on the open seas, inspired by Adrift , starring Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin as two young lovers whose boat is incapacitated after sailing directly into a catastrophic hurricane (and with Claflin’s character suffering from a life-threatening injury). Likewise, the movies in this gallery see heroes under immense pier pressure when their boats get hijacked, destroyed, or worse of all, disappeared all together.
Note: Because a lot of movies fall under this theme, we’re not including submarine movies ( Das Boot , Below , Black Sea ) or movies where the heroes can generally head home at any time ( Jaws , The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou ).
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Then keeping your mind active.". Ashcraft survived 41 days adrift in the Pacific, subsisting on peanut butter and willpower, before she approached Hilo, Hawaii and was picked up by a Japanese ...
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