Diana Nyad is back at it again - once more in the water off Havana and heading, she hopes, to Key West.

The 62-year-old endurance athlete jumped into waters off Cuba at 3:42 p.m. Saturday, one day earlier then she and her Xtreme Dream team had originally planned, according to her Twitter page.

If all goes well, she will swim some 103 miles and for perhaps 60 hours before arriving in the Florida Keys. "Right now, (the water) is fantastic and so (the team) has been brainstorming and thinking, we've got to get out there," Nyad said at a Saturday news conference, explaining the decision to start early.

Nyad has tried three times before to venture across the Straits of Florida.

Each attempt ended prematurely - starting in 1978 when rocky seas left her battered, delirious and less than halfway toward her goal and twice last year, once done in by an 11-hour asthma attack and later thwarted by box jellyfish stings.

The Associated Press