Two Rhode Island men and a French bulldog sailing to Florida gave friends and family quite the scare, and prompted a multiday Coast Guard search that covered more than 30,000 square nautical miles, when they did not arrive at one of the planned stops on their route.

Childhood friends Ryan Hollis and Josh Cairone, both 39, accompanied by Cairone's bulldog, Louis, departed from Jamestown, R.I., on the morning of Oct. 23 on Hollis' 43-foot Beneteau sailboat named Carol K. They were headed for Miami, Fla., where the two are relocating for a job with a solar energy company.

They were supposed to arrive in Norfolk, Va., last Friday. When Hollis' girlfriend didn't hear from him, she reported him missing to the Coast Guard. An air crew based in Elizabeth City, N.C., spotted the sailboat on Monday about 100 miles off the coast of Cape Henry, Va., and were able to communicate via radio with the pair to determine that they were OK.

Speaking by phone Thursday from Beaufort, N.C., where they are recuperating for a few days, Cairone said what started as smooth sailing quickly turned into a harrowing experience.

Despite that, "we never really felt we were in enough danger to ask for help," Cairone said, adding that he and Hollis, who was living on the sailboat in Portsmouth, R.I., are both experienced mariners. The experience left them "bruised and battered a bit," he said.

The first day of their journey was filled with good sailing, followed by two days of no wind, leaving them to rely on the sailboat's motor. Meanwhile, the Gulf Stream, a strong ocean current that brings warm water from the Gulf of Mexico into the Atlantic Ocean, kept pulling them farther away from the coast, Cairone said.

They were so far off the coast, they didn't have cell service, so they couldn't let family or friends know what was going on, Cairone said. They tried multiple times to communicate on their handheld radio with the Coast Guard so they could let their loved ones know they were OK, but to no avail.

Ultimately, they were able to get in touch with operators of two different tankers after a few days. Though the operators of one of the tankers spoke only French, the two were able to communicate who they were to the other tanker. The following day they were spotted by the Coast Guard's HC-130J Hercules aircraft from Elizabeth City, Cairone said.

After the two days of "motoring around," they awoke to heavy winds — the result, they later found out, of an "oddball" hurricane that reportedly developed farther east than any hurricane on record in the North Atlantic Ocean Basin.

Cairone said it was raining so hard, he couldn't open his eyes — "sheets and sheets and sheets of water."

"It was like being in a washer machine," he said.

The boat was keeled over at 55 degrees, spinning in circles.

"My chart plotter shows me doing a whole bunch of circles and that's just us going with the storm," Hollis said.

They had no choice but to remain calm and hunker down "while the storm did its work on us," he said.

Cairone said he didn't realize quite how big of a scare they'd caused until he got into cell service and saw he had received several hundred text messages, including from people he hasn't talked to in decades.

He said he and Hollis are eternally grateful to the Coast Guard for their efforts to search for them and let their families know they were OK.

He plans to send a thank-you note to Beneteau, the company that made the sailboat. "It passed the test. We put it through a bit of a test," he said.

They spent Wednesday night recovering: taking hot showers, eating steak — including a ribeye for Louis, because he was celebrating his first birthday — and drinking bourbon. Cairone said several boaters in North Carolina recognized them — "Hey, it's the Carol K" — given the search was widely shared on social media and within the boating community.

As for the remainder of the journey to Miami, Cairone said he and Hollis are hoping the rest of the trip is "not quite as eventful."

j.bergman@theday.com