A St. Augustine waterman will test his endurance on Father’s Day weekend when he participates in an 83-mile stand-up paddleboard race from the Bahamas to Florida to raise money and awareness for cystic fibrosis.
Brian Scrone, who lives in the Vilano Beach area, will compete in the relay race with three other First Coast residents and friends, Tim O’Neal, Mike Grinney and Mike Jones. The event, Crossing For A Cure, starts in Bimini in the Bahamas and ends in Lake Worth, Florida. According to the race website, the event was inspired by the health benefits of the ocean for those living with cystic fibrosis, an inherited disorder that causes severe damage to the lungs, digestive system and other organs in the body.
Race founder and executive director Travis Suit’s daughter Piper was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at age 4 in 2011. In 2013, Suit and a few friends kickstarted the event by completing the paddle themselves to gain exposure for everyone living with the disease. Now in 2019, Scrone said 100s if not 1000s of people are involved.
“The organization is growing, and the awareness around it is growing, and it’s just an honor to be a part of it,” said Scrone, a young father himself who was drawn to the father-daughter story behind the race.
Scrone helped a few of his friends train for the race in 2018, and they ultimately won. Now, he’s ready to get in on the action and help support the cause.
The race will take place Friday, June 15. Scrone said his team will pull out of Bimini around midnight or 1 a.m. to complete the paddle across the Atlantic, up the Gulf Stream and into Lake Worth, which is just south of West Palm Beach.
The race, according to Scrone, takes about 12 to 15 hours to complete, which translates to each person on the relay team paddling for about three to four hours. Scrone said his team will be taking turns completing 20-minute sprints.
“You basically sprint for 20 minutes and have an hour break,” Scrone said. “You keep doing that for 15 hours until you hit Florida.”
Each team is required to have its own support boat. Scrone’s friend from West Palm Beach, Mike Hilghman, has a granddaughter with cystic fibrosis, and he will be the team’s boat captain.
To train for the race, Scrone has been competing in stand-up paddleboard races in the area, ranging in distance from 1-mile to 5-mile events. He also works hard to train in his free time, paddling in the ocean and Intracoastal Waterway near his house in the Vilano Beach area. Because the conditions for the race are unknown, Scrone has also been training in various weather and swell conditions.
With the race just over 40 days away, Scrone is most looking forward to raising money and awareness around Cystic Fibrosis. Each racer has to raise a minimum of $1,500 in order to enter. Scrone is accepting donations online at https://bit.ly/2GL2QV0. According to the race website, proceeds from the fundraising go to helping local families with cystic fibrosis through the Piper’s Angels Foundation programs. More information about Crossing for a Cure can be found at https://www.crossingforacure.com/.
“I really got emotionally drawn into the story in some of the videos that Crossing for the Cure offers,” Scrone said. “The story itself, Piper and her father and their family’s story and the supporting and raising awareness of Cystic Fibrosis, is a really heartwarming story.”
