15 October 202521:08812 views on YouTubeWatch on YouTube
Start with what this episode is not. There is no crash in it, no injury, no hospital visit, no lesson learned the hard way. Nobody was hurt. What prompted it was the reaction of people who assumed otherwise and were pleased about it, and the two decades of comments that come with riding without a helmet on camera.
The position, stated plainly
This is not an argument against safety gear. Helmets get worn here for snowboarding, skiing, motorcycles and ultralights, and Verdant Ride’s stated position is that helmets and properly fitted, self-righting PFDs meaningfully reduce the chance of injury or death. The rule being applied on the water is a personal one: wear as much protective gear as will protect you without ruining the thing you came to do. Where that line sits for eFoiling, after hundreds of falls that all landed in water rather than on the board, is a judgement made from experience rather than from principle. The objection is not to the gear. It is to strangers deciding another adult’s risk budget for them.
Impact vests are not flotation, and that matters
The most useful safety content in the episode is aimed at the people recommending impact or concussion vests as a compromise. Those vests were worn for years in competitive wakeboarding, for a specific reason: they protect your kidneys when you land flat on your back. They are not built to float you, and they will not. If you are knocked unconscious, or you simply take a bad cramp, a vest like that leaves you face down on the surface. People have died believing the vest they were wearing was a life jacket. If flotation is what you want, buy flotation, and buy the self-righting kind.
Where the rules stop making sense
The central demonstration is a walk down to the water comparing risk against legality. You can stand on a dock, swim alone across a large lake, or surf medium waves with no flotation on you and break no law. Step into a boat tied to that same dock without a jacket and you are committing an offence. The drowning risk is not what separates those cases. What separates them is that forcing swimmers into life jackets would obviously destroy swimming, and we have collectively accepted that swimmers get to make their own call. An eFoiler has a large buoyant board attached to them the entire time, which is more flotation than a distance swimmer has, and yet that is where rules tend to land.
Why this gets argued about at all
The reason for making a whole episode of it is regulatory rather than personal. Once “you shouldn’t do that” goes unchallenged for long enough it becomes “you can’t”. Foot-steered boards are already banned in some places. Open props are already restricted elsewhere, on craft where every outboard in the harbour has an unguarded propeller on it. The ask at the end is small and specific: keep wearing whatever gear you choose, say so, and push back when you see another rider given a hard time purely over their own gear decisions. Requests to hand the platform over to promoting PFDs get a blunt answer, which is that this audience already knows exactly what a life jacket is and does not need to be told.
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