July 11

July 11 1900 hrs. Position N 38.16 / W 153.07 100 miles made good.
As predicted the winds died last night and we fired up the motor. The good part was we were able to steer north. We sailed a big dogleg course yesterday, not sure of actual miles sailed but for the 24 hr. period, point to point it was 100 miles. We've come over 1000 miles from Hawaii and the GPS shows about 1350 miles to the Columbia River. Of course as with our course yesterday, that is as the crow flies and our actual distance will be greater. The seas have been nice and calm with this lull in the wind. We've seen all kinds of little stuff floating by but still nothing significant. At 6 am this morning Bob woke me up (something about that time in the morning with him). We had a piece of rope on the prop and needed to shut down and get rid of it. There was zero wind but we dropped the main just in case and shut everything down. Bob got out his gear and went for a little swim, luckily it came right off, didn't even need to cut it. The rest of the day was spend working our way through misc. maintenance items. Dropped some diesel into the tanks to get the Jerry cans off of the deck, moved the chafe points on the wind vane and drained some water out of the fuel water separators. We are still motoring along at about 5 knots. There is a big, ugly rain cloud ahead so it looks like we may get a little wet tonight. Bummer, I really enjoy doing my middle of the night watches in the cockpit. Maybe I'll get lucky and we'll be through it before midnight.