The Circle.

The first image of Tillikum surrounded by thoughts about turning dream into reality.

I started with crows even though this story purports to be about a canoe. Imagining begins well before the first design line is drawn and it is a step often skipped over in the rush to rational nuts and bolts planning. Can you imagine, what do you dream, are questions that access the creative and organizing parts of our mind. Crows were my dream guides for that important first imaging of a sailing canoe slipping along in the moonlight, still shrouded in darkness and mystery but on the way to take its part in the its developing design and construction.

Tillikum arrived first in the back pages of my sketchbook, a place I do my thumbnail sketches for all sorts of projects, and typically the first drawing was fairly complete, as though I had been given the whole before the parts and my job was simply to prove it out. I had dreamed for years of making a paddling canoe into a row boat: That long slim hull propelled by oars would be an interesting hybrid, and this drawing showed the raised and widened sides that would make this possible. Sails, I had already proven to work on another canoe journey and the gunwale flotation was an idea that worked well on my dory Edith. When a tent-like canopy idea surfaced I was on my way to adopting the camping/sailing model that we had used on our Wharram designed catamaran Amazon that we had sailed in the Bahamas. So perhaps the design roots of Tillikum were not that mysterious after all but the way all the design components gelled without conscious thought still fascinates me and I always give full room for its free operation.

Once the canoe is built, the final stage will be the fulfilment of the dream: the adventure into the unknown landscape, of new knowledge only revealed through experience. That step will be the culmination of the impulse that began the project and the closing of the circle where experience provides the matrix from which new ideas will spring.