Oyster Bay · Huntington Bay · Long Island Sound
An eFoil is three feet of mast between you and the water, and the whole sport is throwing your weight into something unstable that steadies if you read it right. Film can show you that. It cannot let you feel it.
So this is the test ride the showroom doesn't have: real rigid-body physics at 240 Hz, a sea that moves under you, and a bay with a far shore you can name. It runs in the browser. Nothing to install, nobody watching.
The recent event
Races turn up on the water on their own. Every entry threads the same golden rings on the same line, and par is the same number for everyone — the course over a flat 8.3 m/s — so a clean run beats it and a scrappy one does not. Here is the last one, as it ran.
How it works
There is no steering wheel on an eFoil and there isn't one here. You lean, the board carves; you move your weight fore and aft, the nose finds its height. The only other control is the throttle.
Hold it upright and the handset becomes your body — drop a rail and the board drops with it, tip the top away and your weight goes forward. Only the angle is read, so where you hold it doesn't matter. The rail down the right-hand side is the throttle.
The pointer locks to a ring on the deck and your mouse moves your weight around it. Across is your weight off the board: it rolls, and a rolled board turns until you roll it back. The wheel is the throttle — 0 to 20, where zero is no thrust at all.
Start lying down and roll the throttle on. As the foil takes your weight the hull lifts clear and the drag falls away — that is the moment the sport is about. Come up to a knee, then to your feet, as the speed allows. Standing from rest will put you in the water.
A column of light stands over the start. Get there however you like — by hand or on the autopilot — and the course is billed at you: three named places, two legs, a par. Take it and the screen goes black, everyone is put on the line, and the clock starts on GO. Or choose to watch it instead, from the blimp.
Twenty-three kilometres of the North Shore, from Oyster Bay east to Huntington Bay — forty-seven named places, and a far shore you can always name. The board is a 5′6″ 130-litre deck, and the water is never empty: there are moorings to miss and traffic under way. Go and fly it.
Take the board