Dhe furious journey across the water begins with a soft whirring and brief jerking. But the power that this thing has, you can feel at first, something irrepressible that wants to break free and be turned into fun. We’re testing an electric surfboard, and you lie on it to start. Two handles are attached to the bow, it is best to hold them tightly, a bit like a tire on a water slide. The difference is the Bluetooth throttle grip, which you also hold in your hand. But be careful: if you bend your index finger just a little bit, the board, which is almost two meters long, twitches like a racehorse in the starting box. And if you angle it a little more, it gallops away almost silently across the water.
After a few meters, in a first act of high spirits, you can try to kneel on the board and hold the reins (a tether) with your right hand. The throttle should be kept really steady in the left hand. Now get up carefully, and if the board is in a good mood, you might not even fall into the water. With the tether you even stand quite stable on the jet-powered surfboard, quickly get a deceptive feeling of security and drive the first curves. And if you add recklessness to your high spirits, you bend your index finger a little further and glide across the lake at around 30 km/h. What fun!
The new electric surfboard is called mo-jet and is manufactured by a start-up from Norderstedt near Hamburg. The idea for this came from Benjamin Köhnsen, whom we meet to test on this sunny June day on the shore of Lake Seddin, an hour from Berlin. “We founded the company in 2019, but due to Corona and the further development we are only going to sell it now,” he says and clicks the two heavy batteries into the recesses provided on the board. They produce 100 pieces this year. For the coming year, they aimed for 500. “I had the idea for it back in 2009 – I just imagined at the time that something like that could be pretty fun.”
Either as a surfboard or bodyboard
A few company foundations and bankruptcies later, the mo-jet emerged as the product of 13 years of tinkering. “We built 15 1:5 scale RC models and tested them over and over again. Only three of them were shortlisted – the best shape has turned out to be this one,” says Köhnsen, pointing to the board at our feet. “mo” stands for “modular” because it consists of a robust polyethylene base part, in which the motor and batteries are located, and various front parts. So it can be used as a surfboard, but also as a shorter bodyboard or longer rescue board. There is also a foil, a board with a wing substructure that lifts it out of the water while it is moving. And soon there will also be a diving board for underwater trips.