Possible run in with pirates??! 🏴‍☠️🫢

Emma Haley

So curious on everyone’s thoughts of who was approaching our boat in the middle of nowhere… It was coming on 1 day and 15 hours at sea, around sunrise, when we were smack dab in the middle of Dominica and Martinique. I was on watch while Andrew went to sleep an hour before, and it was around 6:30am. We were in 8ft seas with 20-25 kts and just a reefed main out. I saw a small ~24ft panga parallel to us going the opposite way around 500 yards away. I didn’t think too much of it, but woke Andrew up from a weird gut feeling. We hadn’t seen any boats in the almost 2 days sail so was weird to suddenly see that small boat that close. After Andrew got up the panga made a 90 degree turn coming straight at us. It was so rough their bow was flying into the air and to us it made no sense why they were so far offshore. They got within 200 yards of us before they turned off back on their track. It was 2 guys and we assume they turned back because it was too rough to go dead into the waves. I got a short video of the boat.. what do you guys think?? We can’t figure out what in the world was going on, but all we know is it scared the shit out of us seeing them come at us & we felt like they were definitely a threat😳 oh, and this all happened the morning of Andrew’s birthday 😂 Anyway, the rest of the sail was totally fine, worse weather than forecasted but our first time in forever flyyyying and we reached our max speed ever at 10.1kts! So fun to finally have a beam reach and making our best time on a passage yet. Excited for the rest of the sail south 🤙🏼 Now that we’re close enough to Grenada and are able to have a quick sail down, we’re going to take our time exploring the next few islands on the way down.

Boat & Crew

Afterglow

Hunter, 460

Andrew Knott

Owner

Isla

Pet, Female

Emma Haley

Owner