Article · Field notes
Sunset Duckies: The Board
30 May 2026 22 min read
The board is done.
That sentence is doing more work than it looks like. Three months ago this was a white blank on a stand at Santosha, with pencil marks on the foam and a lot of adults saying sensible things about patience. Now it is a 5’6” shortboard with a pointed nose, three fin boxes, a teal checkerboard tail, and a duck in sunglasses on the deck.
It is also the first thing Noah has made that is too big to hide on the fridge.
The design
In the original plan Noah wanted flames. That made sense. Flames are what you draw when you are eight and someone asks what a fast thing should look like.
Then he sat at the kitchen table with printer paper and drew a duck.
I would like to say I understood immediately that the duck was better. I did not. I thought we were still warming up. He kept drawing, crossing things out, starting again. A sunglasses version appeared. Then a name. Then a little map of where things would go on the board.
The finished logo style came later, and it was not a solo act. We tried versions, put them in front of the other Duckies, let them vote, ignored some of their opinions, listened to others, and kept going until the thing felt like it belonged to the group rather than just to our kitchen table.
He labelled the parts in pencil: Back side, Logo, Pad, Lightning. Along the rail he wrote, “Sunset Ducky, designed by Noah.”
That was the useful part of the design process. Not the clean version, not the render, not the bit where adults make it presentable. The useful part was the pile of ugly pages before the one that stuck. Paper lets a child be serious without having to be careful. Foam does not. Once you take too much off a rail, that is the shape now.
By the time we walked into Santosha, Noah’s weight and our home break had set the dimensions. The drawing had given us the centre of the thing. The group helped decide what it should look like once it became real.
Shaping the blank
The blank arrived looking nothing like a surfboard. Just foam, stringer, pencil marks, and too much material everywhere.
Before Daniel let him near a tool, Noah had to learn what he was looking at. Where the outline would come from. What the stringer was doing. Why a board can look symmetrical and still feel wrong under your hand.
Most of shaping, from where I was standing, is sanding. Not dramatic sanding. Not movie sanding. Slow sanding, where almost nothing seems to change and then suddenly too much has changed.
That is a hard lesson for a kid. The board did not reward excitement. It rewarded stopping, looking, running a hand along the rail, and doing the same boring motion again. Noah learned which pad actually removed foam and which one only cleaned up the scratches. I held things, fetched grit, took photos, and tried not to turn every moment into advice.
Daniel would show him the motion once, then hand him the tool. Noah did almost all of the shaping himself. Not ceremonially, not for the photo. He stood there in the bay with a mask on and took foam off his own board.
The place has its own smell and light: resin, dust, hexagons overhead, finished boards drying on the rack. Over a few weeks his passes got less nervous. He stopped waiting to be placed in front of the work.
Clips from the bay. Tap to expand.
Glass and fins
Glassing went back to Daniel and the Santosha crew. Fiberglass over foam, resin mixed and poured, fin boxes routed into the bottom, everything sealed before small hands could turn it into fingerprints.
Noah watched most of that part with his hands behind his back. For him, that is not a posture. It is a negotiation.
Painting the duck
Then the colour.
The chevron was masked stripe by stripe. The “DUCKIES” letters were cut as a stencil. The tail became a checkerboard one square at a time, with tape doing most of the precision work and Noah doing the spraying.
This was his favourite day. Spray paint, respirator, permission to point a can at the thing he had been sanding for weeks.
The checkerboard came out cleaner than I expected. He kept the stencil offcut.
The duck logo and wordmark went on as printed decals under the gloss coat. The stripes, checkerboard, and bolt are paint Noah laid down himself. That distinction matters to him, so it matters here.
The finished board
And then it was a board.
Not a project, not a render, not a dusty thing on stands. A finished surfboard outside in daylight, with fins still to go in and wax still to come.
The whole roll
Every other frame from the three months, 188 of them, left mostly as they came off the phone.
The full reel
All 90 clips from the build. They autoplay as you scroll; tap any one to expand it.
Tap a clip to play it large, with sound.
Daniel Kux taught Noah through the whole build and trusted him with more of the work than I expected. Lara, Bron, Mark, Theila, Robyn, and I all helped around the edges. Mostly I held the camera, carried things, and watched Noah work out the difference between owning something and having made it.
It goes in the water this weekend.
The rest of the story
The duck did not stay on the board. That part got stranger than planned.