Exclusive Interview With Creator Of The World’s Largest Rubber Duck, Craig Samborski

LEONARDTOWN, Md. – We had the great pleasure of sitting down with Craig Samborksi, the World’s Largest Rubber Duck creator! The duck will visit Leonardtown this weekend as part of Wharf Fest from August 4-6. The duck will be positioned on land at the wharf.

Since he was just 14 years old, Craig Sambrorski has made a living in the entertainment business. He started as a door guard for his local arena. From there on, he would work various positions such as stagehand, ice maintenance, event maintenance, and security, and eventually worked his way up to Director of Entertainment.

Around 2009, Samborski was approached to coordinate festivals. Specifically with tall ships, such as the pirate ships in “Pirates of the Caribbean.” While producing a festival in Los Angeles, Samborski was having a couple of drinks with one of his colleagues from the city of LA, who gave him the idea of creating the world’s largest rubber duck.

“During that, he said, ‘You know Craig, you’re a nice event producer from Minnesota, but you’re in LA, and you need to go big or go home,’” Samborski told The BayNet. “Then I was like, ‘Well, what does that mean?’ and he said I should build the world’s largest rubber duck.”

Samborski loved the idea and immediately got to work on it, teaming up with many specialists to get the right components. The duck eventually debuted just nine weeks later in the port of LA. The duck is a little over six stories high, 64 feet wide, and 74 feet long, and the balance that holds it on the ground can vary between 16,000 and 24,000 pounds!

Samborski also explained that they are getting further and further away from showcasing the duck on water due to the extraneous amount of work, time, and money it costs.

“When people come to see the duck, they’re like, ‘Wow, it’s really cool on the water, now put it on land so we can take pictures with it,’ and that production of moving it is just not easy. Putting it on the water is just super expensive,” Samborski explained.

With all of the intricate details and components that go into putting the duck on water versus putting it on land, it just makes more sense for them to start only showcasing on land, except for more major events.

Samborski then went on to express how he feels whenever people get to see the duck and why it is so unique to others, including himself.

“What is it that you’re doing at these festivals? Why is the audience there? They’re there to be entertained, and they want to forget about their problems, their mortgage payments, maybe they don’t have a job, maybe they have the stress of bills, maybe they just have other stresses in life. When they come to see the duck, there’s just this kind of pure joy that happens,” noted Samborski. “That’s the biggest payoff for me, so I definitely love getting all the media attention for the duck; that’s great, but what really tips the scale for me is when I see families, kids, or people that come alone to see the duck. I get hundreds of emails about what the duck means to people, and It’s really gratifying to see them kind of getting out of it what I get out of it; it’s really hard not to just look at the duck and be really happy, and just experience some joy, even if it’s just for a few minutes. It’s a reminder of similar times when we were kids and we didn’t have the stress of adults.”

To see the full interview, click the video at the top of the article!

Contact our news desk at [email protected]

Writer/Photographer More by JJ Atchison