Ted Hunter isn’t a skateboarder, he’s a windsurfer. He’s also an artist and the furniture-design professor at Toronto’s OCAD University, where he has been teaching for 23 years.

While Ted and his wife Norah Jackson were windsurfing on the beautiful island of Maui in 2001, Ted volunteered his time at the Hui No’eau Visual Arts Center, a non-profit gathering place for artists. He was asked to teach a class of teens in the woodshop. As he had never taught such a young age group before, he had a challenge ahead of him — what to teach them? Norah suggested building a skateboard deck, as it involved the bending of wood, something Ted was well known for using in his sculptures.

That was the beginning of Roarockit.