what was I thinking?

This board was a result of several factors and influences

I wanted a board small enough to fit in the back seat of the car, but still offer the float / paddling of a longer board (like "trunk boards", but not quite as small)

I wanted to use the square tail / square nose to give it a straighter rail curve than most small wide boards, something I had also seen on the "trunk boards".

I had seen several step-decks on swaylocks, with good ride-report, and figured my rail system lent itself especially well to a step-deck.

I was curious about challenging certain assumptions, wanting to build a board with no ribs - and diverging from the common practise of running the planks lengthwise or diagonally.

Another factor was that I had read several forum posts of builders fighting to bend the deck into the compound curves that rocker / dome created on top. So I decided to design a board that has no bent pieces of wood in it, at all. This was a result of a discussion I started on tree-2-sea concerning my desire to build a wood board that capitalized on wood's strengths, without fighting to make it imitate foam in shape or structure.

I always build my decks piece by piece over the framework, so I seldom have to struggle to bend it the way others do. But in this case, the entire board was to be built of straight pieces of wood.