Crystal Cathedrals

   Brownlow Point was a barrier that had hung in the distance, as a promise of safety from the approaching ice that July day over a month previous. The wind and ice had other ideas, however, and as related in the first entry, had turned into a corkscrew to cut me off. 
   Now, as I approached this mid August morning, the ice had changed it's strategy. Towering chunks of ice sculptured by the elements were mobilized by the encouraging of the wind, to cut across my path and push me relentlessly into the shore. If I didn't make it past the Point, it could be weeks before the wind shifted and pushed them away to allow my passage through - weeks that I did not have. 
   If they moved at all.
   I bent to the paddle, blades winging into the spray as I pulled with a will in a desperate race to beat the crowding ice. The encroaching pack swayed around me, rolling with the swells as it steadily slid closer into the last opening left. Grinding as a staggering wall into the shallows, they pitched and rolled as they hovered over me. Then the growlers moved out from hiding behind them, to ground and bump their way around the bergs towards the Point. 
   The shallows would not stop the approaching growlers, though they were breaking up in the steepening swells as they began to mass towards the shore.
   But the way the pack was closing in, it could easily stop me.
   I was surrounded by those swaying towers as I made a bid for the only opening left to me - the surf crashing over the bar extending from the Point. If I timed it wrong, the Kayaq's hull would grind to a halt against the bar between the waves, allowing the next breaker to crash over and roll me. But if timed just right...the fan tail stern lifted her up... back paddling hard now to ride the crest for the next, larger swell. Feeling her slide back, then stagger, to lift on the next - This had to be it - Bending into the force of the building sea with everything literally riding on this wave, the sleek hull lifted, hesitated, then shot ahead. The bow protruded from an immersing wall of water, as the submerged Kayaq raced amidst a foaming, turbulant breaker towards a barrier naked of the very water desperately needed to pass. Then the entire wave explodes against the bar - and the Kayaq shot through, carried to slide almost nonchalantly, like a duck settling into a pond of calm, undisturbed water. 
   Taking off the sunglasses to clean them, I turned to look back at the swaying monoliths behind me now, as they bumped and rolled against the bar. The growlers remained to ride the swells around them as they ground to a halt against the shoreline. Before me the water was open, and a calm lagoon at Thompson Point awaited the evening, with a playful Arctic fox in his brown and light tan tux there to greet me. 

   These were the memories that further the design before me now. The tundra wind, the grinding, hammering ice and sea - She will be of either composite construction in aluminum, or of a nylon ballistic cloth and wood, to live again as a creature amidst the sea. Here her challenges are not as intense, but life can be. And as my Wife travels with me often enough, upon the very seas that could care less about any of us who travel her expanse, it falls upon me to design and build her well. Because we never know when or where she may be required to fight to survive, and us with her.

   She is still inquiring after me..?
   And I'm listening.
   A good designer always does...
-WKD