Overnight crossing from Double Breasted Cay to St Augustine with a big storm!

Andrew Laird

We left Double Breasted Cay at 6am and started our 36 hour journey right before sun rise. We had to navigate a coral field on our way out to the open ocean which was a combination of using our track from the previous year, looking at google earth and Boating apps to make sure we didn’t hit anything since we did not have good visuals that early. It started off easy enough. We had both sails up and wind of 12-15 knots on the beam. We sailed the entire day then put our sails down at sunset in case we were hit by a surprise squall overnight. The weather was calling for scattered squalls off the FL coast. We had not rain or issues overnight and had a beautiful sunrise the next day. Soph and I took turns sleeping although it was hard (for me at least) to actually fall asleep. As usually we were escorted by dolphins multiple times thought the journey. First was a pod of about 12 Atlantic spotted dolphins, next a lone bottlenose dolphin, then a few more smaller groups of spotted dolphins as we got closer to the coast. We were almost done with our journey and about 3km from the St Augustine inlet when we were finally hit by a huge squall at about 3pm. The wind shifted from the west to the North and was gusting past 30knts. The swell picked up significantly and we decided to ride the storm south for the worst of the wind for about 20-30 mins. We then turned back into the wind and pounded our way back to St Augustine. The waves were about 4 feet and it was not comfortable. There was white our rain and lots of lightning. Duggie was definitely a little scared (and so were we).