What the first working eFoil flight must have felt like

Every so often it is worth stopping to notice how strange the thing you are doing actually is. You are standing on a board, held a couple of feet clear of the water by a wing you cannot see, moving under your own power. That was not possible within living memory.

The homemade jetpack

The framing offered here is hard to argue with: getting the first functional eFoil to fly was the equivalent of a kid building a working jetpack in the garage. For a surf kid in particular, that was the pinnacle, the thing everyone imagined and nobody expected to see. Nick Leason had that morning. The rest of us get to buy the result and take it out on a Tuesday.

Why a submerged wing wins

There is engineering under the sentiment. A wing running below the surface is more agile, more efficient and faster than a craft carving on the surface with the same power plant behind it, because it is not dragging a hull across the water. That is the whole reason foiling took over: the same battery goes further and the same motor goes faster once the board is out of the water and only the mast and wing remain in it.

Still the best kept secret

The episode ends on genuine puzzlement about why this has not caught on more widely. There is no commercial angle in the enthusiasm, the stated reason for making the show is that it is enjoyable and that more people should find out it exists. Flying above the water is simply too much fun to stay this obscure.

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