20 June 20263:2095 views on YouTubeWatch on YouTube
Nobody knows how many people ride eFoils. That sounds like it should be a solved question, but it is not, and this episode explains why it matters enough to build a website around it.
Log a ride without typing it out
The site takes ride logs two ways. You can fill in a form, or you can hand it your GPX files, which is described here as the much easier route: drop the logs in, and every ride in them is read and dropped onto the map. If you already record your sessions on a watch or a phone, you have a backlog you can upload in one go rather than entering rides one at a time.
What the data is actually for
The interesting part is what all those logs add up to. The questions being aimed at are the ones riders argue about constantly and nobody can settle: which wings make a real difference, which boards give the most time per battery, which batteries hold up, and whether generation to generation changes are as significant as claimed. You can optionally add height, weight and age, which is what turns a set of ride logs into comparable performance data instead of a pile of tracks. All of it is optional and all of it is anonymised.
Why nobody knows the size of the sport
There is an honest aside in the middle of this that is worth sitting with. Getting hard numbers on how many eFoilers exist worldwide has proved almost impossible. Owners, senior people and founders at the brands either do not know or say they do not, and the figure is not sitting anywhere public. The suspicion voiced here is that the real number may not be much above ten thousand riders. If that is even close to right, a rider built database is the only way the sport will ever get a picture of itself.
The privacy problem, and the fix
Publishing a ride map means publishing where people ride, so locations are jittered by roughly four kilometres. That alone turned out to be insufficient, and finding out took an experiment: dropping fifty rides in at once still showed almost exactly where they had been ridden, because a cluster of randomised points still has a centre. The fix was to make the jitter compound. If a ride lands near another ride, it gets moved again, which spreads a rider’s logs across the general area instead of stacking them on one lake. Upload twenty sessions and your spot should stay yours. The map also colours each circle by the brand being ridden, with an other category that will get promoted to a proper option if enough rides come in on it.
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