July 13

July 13, 1900 hrs. Position N 42.03 / W 151.57 Covered 113 miles in the previous 24 hrs.
Big day today, at least in my mind. Measuring on the GPS, as the crow flies, we are now closer to the Columbia River than we are to Honolulu! Measured in a point to point straight line we have covered 1280 miles. We have actually sailed much more than that, but we are not tracking the measurement of our actual tracks. As of right now the GPS shows 1216 nautical miles to the entrance of the Columbia. Once again, we will sail much farther than that to get there, but its a reference.
It was a fairly benign day today. We had a little excitement when I heard something metal land and then bounce across the deck. I call Bob up and we started searching. I found an about 3" long pin lying behind one of the jerry cans. We spent a bunch of time looking up into the rigging, checking the mast, boom, shackles, etc and couldn't figure out where it came from. We didn't think it was a majorly critical piece based upon it's thickness, but it was a bit disconcerting non the less. Bob finally looked down instead of up and noticed the problem. One of the jib cars had basically exploded and the only piece left of the roller was the pin we found. Mystery solved. We just slid the rear car up forward so we had the right angle for the jib sheet and continued on.
We started seeing a bit more tsunami debris today, and a little larger stuff. We had a gas cylinder pass about 200 ft. to starboard of us. We have seen a few what appear to be big timbers. Not sure if they are logs or building material. We don't want to get close enough to figure it out either. That's about it for today. The winds have been pretty light, about 10 knots but the seas have been fairly smooth so we are still making in the 4 - 6 knot range for the day.