Is the Lift 5 Pro worth the upgrade? An open letter to Lift

Upgrade decisions are usually made from a spec sheet, and spec sheets are bad at describing how a board feels. This episode is an open letter to Nick Leason and Lift Foils, written after five years of daily riding, making a case for the only kind of test that would actually answer whether the Lift 5 Pro is worth moving to.

Five years, three boards, no maintenance bill

The relationship being described here is not a casual one. It runs from a Gen 2 Sport through a Lift3 Pro to a Lift4 Pro, ridden between one and four hours on every day the weather allows. Nothing has been spent on maintenance. Problems have happened, and the pattern is that they show up early and get fixed quickly, after which the board keeps working. There is a lifestyle argument too: the boat went after the first eFoil, the boards are quieter and kinder to worn out knees, setup takes less time than climbing into a wetsuit, and a fully assembled board fits in the back of an old Prius, with all three fitting if you collapse them.

Why the Lift 5 Pro looked like it was not for him

The headline Lift 5 features are convenience features: fast attach battery, quick mount mast. Those are excellent if you transport your board, and largely irrelevant if it lives assembled a short walk from the water and takes a bit over a minute to get going. The weight story is more subtle than it first appears. Dropping the battery lid takes real weight off the board itself, but total ride weight came out roughly the same as the setup already in use. The board also got a little longer and a little narrower, which should help rail to rail riding, while the surf oriented hull refinements matter less to someone whose board is rarely touching the water anyway.

The Lift 3 to Lift 4 lesson

What changed the argument was going back to the Lift3 Pro for a ride, then getting back on the Lift4 Pro. On paper the two generations do not look far apart. On the water the difference in balance, quietness and ride quality was enormous. That is the whole reason for the letter: if the last generational jump only revealed itself through hours of riding, the same could be true of this one, and no amount of reading will tell you.

The ask, and the measurable question

The request is a Lift 5 Pro for a week, rigged to match the existing setup so the comparison is board against board rather than gear against gear: a 100 Surf V2 with a 32 Glide for racing, a 160 Camber Pro with a 36 Glide for freestyle, the tall 32 inch modulus mast and a fixed LCS prop with no shroud. The question to be answered is quantifiable rather than vague. Can the Lift 5 Pro take four seconds off a half mile slalom time, and does it lift freestyle riding the way the previous generation did? In return Lift gets a full unfiltered review on the show and access to the raw footage from drones, FPV and 360 cameras on clean Minnesota freshwater. Any purchase afterwards goes through Zen Water Sports, and the board would ideally arrive in yellow.

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