17 September 20245:54299 views on YouTubeWatch on YouTube
Filming an eFoil with a drone usually means the drone follows you. This episode reverses it. A friend designs a flight path in advance, the drone flies it whether or not you are anywhere near it, and the rider’s job is to be in the right place at the right moment for the whole thing to work.
Someone else designs the path
The episode opens with Laura announcing the flight path is finished. The first question back is how long it runs, and the answer is just under four minutes. That is the constraint the rest of the episode lives inside: four minutes of turns that were decided by somebody else, in an order the rider did not choose, with no chance to redesign the parts that are awkward.
Memorising a path by turning it into a song
The method for learning it is the interesting part. Rather than trying to hold a sequence of turns in his head as a list, Stephan finds a song that matches the length and shape of the path, and learns the path against the music instead. Once each turn has a place in a track you already know, you are no longer counting, you are just riding to something familiar. The track he settles on is Seven Nation Army, and the run that follows is flown to it.
The chase, and the crows
The chase itself takes up most of the episode, and the gear listed for it is a Lift4 Pro with a high modulus mast and LCS, running a 100 Surf V2 front wing with a 32 Glide behind. That combination is chosen to hold speed through sharp turns, because a preset path does not slow down for you. There is also a stretch where crows take an interest and fly close to the drone, which is a hazard nobody plans for and worth knowing about if you fly over open water. The episode closes by pointing at the other flight paths in the set.
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