Mill Valley's Catherine Breed has swum 314 of 900 miles down the California coast, reaching Bodega Bay slightly ahead of schedule 40 days into her unprecedented Swim California expedition.

Breed, 33, a former NCAA champion at UC Berkeley, held a public meet-and-greet at Westside Regional Park on Sunday, Aug. 9, where approximately 200 supporters gathered overlooking Bodega Harbor, according to the Press Democrat. The event doubled as a conservation rally, with speakers from two ocean-protection nonprofits joining Breed on the waterfront.

As we reported July 29, Breed launched the attempt July 1 near the Oregon-California border, aiming to reach San Diego by early November.

The hardest stretch so far: rounding Cape Mendocino and the Lost Coast, where weather models proved unreliable. Matthew Sessions, skipper of the 52-foot support sailboat Catalyst, told the crowd that his crew would check forecasts each morning only to find "the water's going the wrong way."

Breed swims at 66 strokes per minute and 2.6 miles per hour, flanked by two vessels she says deter sharks. Asked about great whites at the event, she was blunt: "They are there. They are fish." In 40 days, the team spotted only two sharks, both salmon sharks, which Breed called "extremely uneventful." Her real fear, she told supporters, is failure.

The expedition has divided the route into three legs. Sessions estimates the Oregon-border-to-Golden-Gate-Bridge stretch accounts for 60% of the difficulty. After that, he joked, Breed "could do backstroke from Santa Barbara the rest of the way."

Wildlife has been a constant companion. The crew has counted more than 100 whales, dolphins appeared at the 200-mile mark, and Breed recently encountered a mola mola, a giant sunfish.

Conservation was a central theme at Bodega Bay. Maria Brown, vice president of the Greater Farallones Association, told the crowd that a marine heat wave beginning in 2013 triggered sea star wasting disease and a purple urchin explosion that destroyed more than 90% of bull kelp in Sonoma and Mendocino counties. But Brown reported progress: a tenfold increase in kelp canopy cover at one restoration site over the past year.

Shannon McIntyre Rake, a program manager for Mission Blue, the nonprofit founded by oceanographer Sylvia Earle, noted that Breed's route passes through five of the organization's 170 designated Hope Spots worldwide.

Breed, who ended her competitive pool career in 2015 and joined the San Francisco Dolphin Club for open-water training, has previously swum the English Channel, the North Channel between Ireland and Scotland, and the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge. Her nonprofit, Sea Dreamers, is the conservation arm of the expedition, and the swim drew a CBS Evening News segment on July 26.

The next major milestone is the Golden Gate Bridge, where the expedition's first and most difficult leg ends before the team turns south toward Santa Barbara.