Mounting a 360 camera on an eFoil board with epoxy putty

Most footage of eFoiling makes the sport look boring, and this episode opens by saying so plainly. Boards moving slowly in straight lines, often in slow motion, ridden by people who look like they would rather be somewhere else, even from companies with real marketing budgets. What none of it shows is the thing riders actually chase: half an hour of deep, banked carving that feels like fresh powder on a mountain. Fixing that is a camera problem, so this is a build episode.

Why the usual mounts do not show the ride

Handheld shots and a body mounted camera both sit too close to convey how far and how fast the board is changing direction. A front mount on a carbon pole gets some distance, but the results tend to bow and fisheye, or point at your feet, or tilt up into an odd angle, and the background still slides around without communicating the arc of the turn. The honest conclusion here is that a drone, a chase boat or a side angle probably does better. The experiment is whether a longer carbon pole, light and set out further, can get close to a drone-like shot from the board itself.

The build: epoxy, surface prep and a tether

The mount goes on with a two part epoxy putty, the sort of waterproof repair compound worth keeping around if you own a dock or a boat, because it cures chemically rather than by drying and will set underwater. It is sandable and takes a day or two to cure. One mistake is called out as worth avoiding: bonding straight to smooth gelcoat instead of roughing it up first. Sanding multiplies the contact area, the same way a million tiny pyramids on a flat surface would, and adhesion follows surface area. The mount also goes on off centre, chosen to suit riding left foot forward. Everything gets a lanyard to a safety catch, not to stop the mount breaking, but so the camera is recoverable after it does. Getting the whole rig to float is the harder unsolved problem, and if you want something permanent, very short screws into the glass, each bedded in epoxy, is the alternative offered.

Function over cosmetics, and gear you are not afraid to use

While the epoxy cures, the episode turns into an argument about owning things. The position is that a board is just stuff, that anything replaceable is not worth stress, and that being precious about scratches costs you the enjoyment you bought the thing for. The example given is a relative furious about a door ding nobody else could even see. What matters instead is anything affecting performance: epoxy in the rail channels or on the deck pad is a real problem, a scuff on the top is not.

What it costs, compared with what

The last strand is value. Set the price of an eFoil against a week at a ski resort, a wakeboard boat with the truck and trailer and lift that come with it, or a surf trip measured by how many seconds you actually spend on a wave, and it starts to look like the cheapest and least troublesome route to the sensation of carving. There is an environmental line to it too: quiet, almost no wake, no fuel, and a preference for spending money in places you have actually seen for yourself. It closes on the way to a first eFoil race, with a worry attached: without real competition the sport risks becoming a fad, and racing is what shows riders whether they are improving.

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