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It’s not until the fourth time I fall into the choppy, rolling waves at the mouth of San Francisco Bay, directly below the Golden Gate Bridge, that I realize I probably never should have gone this far out on a motorized surfboard I’ve never ridden before.
I'm zipping around—a foot above the waves most of the time—on an electric hydrofoil board made by the Canadian company Hydroflyer. Jerry McArthur, Hydroflyer’s CEO, is on another of his company’s boards behind me. We started out at a peaceful lagoon inside the bay in Sausalito, but I’ve decided to trek over to the bridge—where the current and waves are the strongest—just to see if the Hydroflyer could handle it. Turns out, it very much can. The question is whether I had the aquatic acumen.
It’s high tide, meaning currents coming in from the ocean are strong and the headwind is ripping, making the approach under the bridge difficult. (McArthur had warned me about these precarious conditions before we left.) At one point I’m gunning the thro
ttle as fast as I can make it go, and the board and I are all but staying in place. I finally cross the threshold to the other side of the bridge, then the wind whips me into the water again. This time, McArthur helps me back up onto the board before the waves can smash me into one of the bridge’s pillars, and finally I can get going.
We head back to the Sausalito lagoon, out of the wind. By the time we are almost home, I’m so exhausted that it’s hard to stay standing on the board. The whole experience was an adrenaline rush—a magnificent scene that I probably never would have experienced without this very expensive electric board. McArthur laughs and says his lawyers probably wouldn’t be very happy to hear that he took me out that far in these conditions. OK cool, I'll be sure not to tell them.
Floating World
Hydrofoils are growing in popularity, particularly among rich dudes. (Just ask Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who famously takes his hydrofoiling hobby very seriously. They can also be spotted at beaches and on lakes. Around the world, there are already around 1,700 companies in the hydrofoil business. Some are the electric kind, powered by either jet or propeller motors. Others are powered and steered purely by human movements. Both designs achieve the same goal of giving the rider a new and fun way to zip around atop the water. Hydrofoils are quieter and less obnoxious than jet skis, and they can be a thrilling stand-in for windsurfing on days when there's no breeze.
Hydroflyer, a Canadian company, has been selling its efoil boards for about a year, and McArthur says the company has sold around 150 of them in total. The Hydroflyer is available in one version for now, called Cruiser. Two more models—the flashier Sport and the more beginner-oriented Inflatable—are coming soon. Prices for the Cruiser start at $15,990.
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While I rode the Cruiser model during my test ride, McArthur piloted the zippier Sport model. It takes a few tries to figure out the balancing, but once you learn to feel comfortable pitching your weight forward, staying stable is easy.
These contraptions are heavy. Depending on the model, the Hydroflyer weighs around 108 pounds including both the board and the battery. You can carry them by yourself, sure, but they’re definitely harder to lug around than something like a paddleboard that doesn’t have a heavy motor or a battery.
Below the deck where you stand on the Hydroflyer lives a lithium-ion battery that provides around two hours of aquatic fun time. McArthur says there are three layers of waterproofing to keep the internal cells of the battery from getting wet—which would be very bad indeed. The Hydroflyer tops out at about 27 miles per hour, which is a little slower than some other efoils offer, but still feels plenty speedy when you’re standing on top of it as it blasts across the water.
The Hydroflyer has an electric prop at the end of the keel, meaning there’s a spinning blade at the bottom of the vehicle. This is in contrast to a jet ski or other efoil board designs that use jet propulsion instead of propeller propulsion. Jet motors are definitely safer—there’s no spinny blade to risk getting your toes caught in—but they struggle to match the oomph of a propeller. Still, the Hydroflyer is designed with safety in mind—the prop is surrounded by a circular casing to keep your digits away, and the motor shuts off automatically as soon as you take your finger off the throttle trigger or pull out the kill switch, both of which are connected to the handlebars.
The standout element of the Hydroflyer, of course, is that handlebar pole. Other efoils with handlebars tend to be aimed at beginners, like the SeaDoo Rise with its retractable handle or the Flitescooter with its detachable handle pole. Those handlebar designs can feel more flimsy, as they’re meant to be more of a supplement to help the rider keep their balance. That’s not the case on the Hydroflyer, where the sturdy pole serves as a differentiating feature. The pole here is a very deliberate centerpiece meant to enhance the ride for people of all skill levels. The handlebar assembly can technically be removed if you want a more surfboard-like stance, but McArthur says that isn’t really the point. The point is to feel the way mountain bike riders feel when they’re blasting down a hill. The handles do in fact feel like mountain bike handles because they were designed to feel like mountain bike handles. They’re angled slightly back toward the rider, and they have rubber grips that help your wet hands cling on.
This level of commitment to the design means the pole feels stable—unlike the removable handlebar on the Flitescooter, which in my experience had some real wobble to it that made it hard to keep a grip on. At first I worried about the prospect of smashing my nose on the Hydroflyer’s handlebars in a crash, but after a few tries and falls I realized you'd have to contort yourself in quite a few weird angles to make that a real problem.
Falling is inevitable when you’re starting out on an efoil, but the Hydroflyer has a couple of design elements beyond the handlebar to help a rider keep their balance. One is the shape of the bow, which was designed by a hydrodynamicist who developed racing boats for the America’s Cup. Most of the time when the nose dips down and catches a wave, it bounces right back up rather than nosediving straight down into the water and stopping the board.
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Beginners will also benefit from a set of attachments that hook along the sides of the scooter to expand the surface of the board and help make the thing easier to balance. More advanced riders can remove those, as well as swap out the wing along the bottom to allow for different levels of speed and lift.
Caviar Dreams
McArthur's fellow Hydroflyer hype man, called JP, just flew in from Sydney this morning, yet somehow he has a demeanor that is the complete opposite of jet lagged. (Jet jazzed?) Admittedly, it's difficult to be in a bad mood when your workplace is a tranquil cove in San Francisco Bay with a close-up view of the towering Golden Gate Bridge as the last of the morning fog peels away to let in warm rays of sun. After we're done with the demo, we stand around and chat while changing out of our wetsuits. JP asks me where the yacht clubs in the area are. That's who is likely to be Hydroflyer’s customer base, after all—yacht owners and wealthy types able to shell out $15,000 or more for a fun zip on the bay. The Zuckerbergs and other dudes with plenty of disposable income.
But McArthur says his longer-term goals are more egalitarian. He wants to get a version of the board down below the $10,000 mark. He imagines one day the Hydroflyer could be used as a last-mile form of transit, for people looking to cross the bay or a river. He wants to incorporate autonomous driving and balancing technology, along with a wider board surface to increase stability.
It's unclear whether that will be enough to entice commuters with their office garb and laptops in their bags to hop on and risk that journey standing up as you fly across the waves.
