8 July 202611:25769 views on YouTubeWatch on YouTube
You rarely get to hear what people on the lake think of your eFoil, because by the time they have formed an opinion you have already ridden past them. This episode is the exception. A group of pontoon boats waved a rider over mid-session and asked, unscripted, everything they had been wondering, and the answers are more useful than most gear reviews.
Why one board sounded like a whale and the other did not
The first question from the boats was about noise, because two eFoils were out and only one of them could be heard. The difference is the mast material. An aluminum mast resonates as water flows past it, producing a hum that carries a long way across open water and gets described here, memorably, as an orca trying to mate with you. A carbon fiber mast is effectively silent by comparison. The reason anyone puts up with the noise is price: the aluminum board in question costs roughly half what the carbon one does. Worth noting from the rider’s own account, the sound also drops away once you are properly up on foil, because there is far less mast in the water to excite.
The self-returning board is a trick, not a feature
The second question was whether the board has a button that brings it back to you, because that is exactly what it looks like from a boat. It does not. What is happening is that the wireless controller still works from some distance away in the water, so you feed in enough throttle to lift the nose and let the board pivot, and once it is pointed at you, you ease off and let it coast in. The hand gestures added on top are pure theatre. Any board can essentially be brought back this way, with one caveat worth knowing: some models include safety interlocks that stop the motor running when nobody is on the board. If you have ever swum a long way after a fall, this is the trick that saves you doing it again.
Five years, zero maintenance, still going
Someone asked about battery problems on the older board, and the answer was none. That board is a Lift2 Sport now into its fifth year, and it has had no maintenance performed on it at all, deliberately. The stated experiment is to find out how long one of these will run with nothing done to it. Anyone weighing an eFoil against a boat should sit with that for a moment, because ownership cost is where the two diverge hardest.
Lending boards, and how fast people pick it up
The session started because new neighbors asked to borrow the fleet. Mike took the SiFly Stellar X, sent over by the company for testing, his daughter Ellie rode the old Lift2 Sport, and the yellow Lift5 Pro was out alongside them. One condition applies to borrowing: get a professional lesson first. Mike had exactly one lesson behind him and this was his third time on the water, which is what genuinely surprised the people watching from the boats. That reaction is the real subject here: eFoiling looks far harder from the outside than it turns out to be.
How the footage gets shot
One more question came up from the boats, about the camera on the stick. It is an Insta360, and the reason for a 360 camera rather than an action cam is that it captures the rider and everyone else on the water at once. Nothing has to be aimed while you ride. What the shot looks at gets decided later, in the edit.
Chapters
- 00:00 Letting the New Neighbors Try the eFoils
- 01:35 Getting Mike and Ellie Up on Foil
- 04:35 Intercepted by the Pontoon Boat Flotilla!
- 04:55 Why Is That eFoil So Loud? (Aluminum vs. Carbon Fiber)
- 05:33 How I Film My Videos (Insta360 Setup)
- 07:10 Neighbors Shocked by the Learning Curve
- 07:40 The Kaper Call Retrieve Trick Revealed 🤫
- 09:00 5 Years of Zero Maintenance?
- 10:00 Post-Ride Wrap Up with Stephan & Mike
- 11:10 Stephan demonstrates the Kaper Call self-returning efoil trick
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