Awake

A second attempt at the same idea

Philip Werner built his first electric surfboard in 2012 and started a company around the idea in 2013. It did not become what he wanted. In 2017 he set up Awake with Daniel Aronsson and Mikael Kajbring to build electric jetboards properly, and the second attempt is the one that reached yachts. The eFoil line, VINGA, followed in the spring of 2022 on the same battery and controller architecture.

Awake is unusually quiet about itself. The company describes its boards as designed and developed in Scandinavia and does not put much corporate detail on its own site, which is worth knowing before an owner relies on it for support in a distant market. What it does publish is a clear specification for every board and battery, which is more than several competitors manage.

The RAVIK jetboards

Three boards share an 11 kW motor and differ in hull and volume. The Explore is the beginner board at 21 kg and 121 litres, with a dual channel hull, a top speed of 40 km/h and up to an hour of riding, at EUR 9,990 before VAT. The Adventure drops to 71 litres on a V-shaped hull, weighs 23 kg, runs to 50 km/h and lists at EUR 13,990. The Ultimate is the carbon composite board at 16 kg and 51 litres, good for 55 km/h.

The Ultimate costs EUR 15,990 before VAT and buys 35 minutes of riding, which is the trade the whole range makes visible. More speed and less volume mean less time on the water. There is also a BRABUS x Awake Shadow Explore at EUR 15,900, a limited edition built with the German tuning house that also builds Brabus Marine tenders. It is the Explore hull in different clothes.

The board price is half the story and the battery is the other half.

Flex 4, and the arithmetic that decides how many packs

Every current board runs the Flex 4 system, a modular pack that clicks into the board without tools and pairs with the HC 4 hand controller automatically. The Flex Battery LR 4 lists at EUR 2,990 before VAT and weighs 12 kg. The larger XR 4 lists at EUR 4,990 before VAT, weighs 18.5 kg, gives about an hour of riding, is rated waterproof to 10 metres and is 5.5 kg lighter than the pack it replaced. Awake sells batteries and hand controllers as separate items on its own store, so what a quoted price covers should be established line by line before signing.

The number Awake does not publish is the charge time, and it is the number that decides the order. Neither the battery pages nor the charger page gives one, and the company sells only a single charger, which it describes as a speed charger, at USD 1,390 net on its own United States store in July 2026. A dealer listing read in the same month puts that charger at two hours or less for a full pack. Set that against about sixty minutes of riding on an XR 4 and one pack is one session, two packs still leave a gap, and three packs and one charger are what keeps a board continuously in the water. Three XR 4 packs come to EUR 14,970 before VAT, which is more than the VINGA Carve costs, and it is the single most commonly under-ordered item on the whole toy list.

VINGA, the eFoil side

VINGA is Awake's answer to Lift and Fliteboard, launched in 2022 and built to run on the same Flex battery and hand controller as the jetboards. The Carve is the intermediate board at EUR 11,990 before VAT, with Adventure and Ultimate variants above and below it for cruising and for performance. The Click-to-Ride system snaps the whole assembly together without tools.

Sharing the battery across both product lines is the strongest argument for buying Awake at all. A yacht that carries two RAVIK jetboards and a VINGA eFoil needs one type of pack, one charger and one charging locker, which simplifies the part of water toy ownership that causes the most trouble. Against that, the VINGA is a newer and less proven eFoil than the boards it competes with.

Riding it, and where it stops

A jetboard is easier than a foil to start and harder to master. The rider lies on the board, comes to their knees under power and stands when the board is planing, and the throttle is a trigger in one hand. The Explore is genuinely forgiving, which is why Awake positions it for guests who have no instructor and minimal supervision. The Ultimate at 51 litres will not float an adult at rest and demands a competent rider.

Top speeds of 40 to 55 km/h are real but the useful cruising range sits well below that. Chop punishes a jetboard more than it punishes a foil, because the hull stays in contact with the surface. In a busy August anchorage the water is usually only good early. Ride times of 35 to 60 minutes are quoted for a light rider in good conditions, and a heavy rider on full throttle will see materially less.

Getting it aboard, and which flag governs the charging

The boards are the easy part. At 16 to 23 kg a RAVIK is a one-person carry and needs a wall rack or a locker of about two metres, with no crane, davit or lifting plan involved. The Flex battery comes out and goes to a charging point, which is where the complication starts. An 18.5 kg pack is not something a guest carries up a passerelle, and it is also the item that the regulations are written about.

The UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency published MGN 681 (M) Amendment 1 on 19 December 2025, covering fire safety, storage and charging of small electric craft aboard yachts, with dedicated cabinet stowage to EN 14470, EN 16121 or EN 16122 required for spare batteries above 100 Wh and UK type approval required for new charging containers from 1 January 2027. Awake packs are far above that threshold, and crew training on thermal runaway is now part of the expectation. The reach is wider than the letters MCA suggest, because the note sits on Part A Chapter 14 of the Red Ensign Group Yacht Code, and the group is the United Kingdom together with the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, the Isle of Man and the other British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. A Cayman-flagged yacht is inside the same chapter, and the Cayman Islands Shipping Registry has gone further: Guidance Note 06/2023, read July 2026, annexes the United Kingdom's MGN 681(M) on the fire safety and storage of small electric powered craft and strongly recommends it be followed on every yacht carrying them until it is folded into the REG Yacht Code. The Republic of the Marshall Islands legislated separately, with a 2026 edition of Yacht Code MI-103 effective 1 January 2026 that introduces specific rules for spaces used to store or charge lithium-ion powered toys and tenders. Malta stayed at recommendation, through a Transport Malta Commercial Yachting Notice of 22 June 2022 and Information Notice 45 of 7 September 2022, and surveys against the Commercial Yacht Code at its 2025 revision. Only the 2027 type-approval date is genuinely UK-only.

What it costs, and the number under the headline

The published prices exclude VAT, which in most European markets adds a fifth or more to the delivered figure. The specification that actually works aboard is a board, three batteries and the charger rather than two, because the charger takes roughly twice as long as a pack lasts. Each additional Flex pack is EUR 2,990 before VAT for an LR 4 or EUR 4,990 for an XR 4, so the third battery takes a realistic Adventure package from around EUR 24,000 before tax to somewhere between EUR 27,000 and EUR 29,000, depending on which pack is specified. These are small numbers against a yacht. They are also roughly double what the board price alone suggests, and the whole of the gap is batteries.

Running costs are modest. Electricity for a charge is negligible against a yacht's daily draw, and there is no fuel, no oil, no impeller wear ring in the sense a petrol board has and no seasonal engine service. The consumable is the battery, and Awake's two year warranty is the yardstick for how long an owner should expect a pack to hold its rated performance before replacement. The cycle life is published, but not where an owner would look for it. Lift Foils warrants its pack to the earlier of two years or 600 battery cycles, and Awake's warranty terms, read July 2026, put the figure at 24 months or 300 full charge cycles, whichever comes first. Half the cycle life for the same two year clock is the number to plan the replacement against.

Service, parts and the Brabus connection

Awake sells through dealers and through the specialist yacht toy suppliers who serve the Mediterranean and Caribbean, and boards can be rented or supported through those channels in most of the usual cruising grounds. The company is small, which cuts both ways. Direct contact is easy and firmware updates arrive through its own app, but there is no equivalent of a Brunswick or a BRP parts network standing behind it.

The BRABUS relationship gives the brand a second route into the yacht world, because Brabus Marine builds tenders and day boats that already sit alongside larger yachts. A failed battery remains the difficult case. Loose lithium packs travel by air as UN3480 dangerous goods, cargo aircraft only and capped at 30 percent state of charge, so a replacement is a matter of days at best in high season.

Against JetSurf, Radinn and the foils

JetSurf's petrol boards are lighter, faster to refuel and cheaper to run, and they are the choice for a rider who wants a racing machine. Radinn, also Swedish, competes directly with Awake on electric jetboards. The eFoil makers, Lift and Fliteboard, compete for the same guest and win on run time, because a foil uses a fraction of the energy to travel the same distance.

Awake wins on the combination of silence, no fuel aboard and one battery family across two kinds of board. It loses on endurance against a foil and on support depth against the large groups. No licence is generally required to ride one, but a powered board is a powered craft to most Mediterranean harbour authorities, and the beach distance rules apply. The wrist strap cut-off should be worn every time.

Class, the IMO, and the price of the locker

Nothing above the flag adds a binding requirement. The International Maritime Organization has no mandatory instrument reaching a portable battery aboard a yacht as of July 2026, and its lithium work sits in the Maritime Safety Committee's review of alternative fuels and new technologies, where MSC 109 added swappable traction battery containers to the list under review and identified nineteen regulatory gaps and MSC 110, sitting from 18 to 27 June 2025, closed the review of regulatory barriers. DNV's Battery (Safety) notation becomes mandatory only above 50 kWh of aggregate installed capacity, which no locker of jetboard packs approaches. Lloyd's Register published LR-GN-052, Guidance Notes on Lithium-Ion Battery Powered Crafts and Vehicles carried on Yachts, on 10 June 2025, addressed to designers, builders and operators as advice rather than rule. ISO 23625:2025 governs lithium-ion batteries above 500 Wh installed in small craft, which catches an electric tender and not a board.

The locker itself is the line nobody prices. The marine active-suppression systems sold against MGN 681, the RACLAN boxes and the modular RAMBSS, and the passive ZARGES BatterySafe cases, were all quotation only in July 2026, with no manufacturer publishing a figure. What is priced publicly is the shore-side industrial cabinet built to EN 14470-1 Type 90, one of the standards the note names. In July 2026 a German supplier listed an asecos ION-CHARGE 90 with pull-out shelves at EUR 3,270 net of VAT, with an internal envelope of 470 by 452 by 582 mm and shelves rated at 25 kg, and a United Kingdom supplier listed the taller asecos ION-CORE-90 at GBP 4,571.04 net or GBP 5,485.25 gross. An 18.5 kg XR 4 pack is the heaviest of the mainstream toy batteries and still inside that 25 kg shelf rating, though two per shelf is not. Neither cabinet carries UK marine type approval, the thing that becomes mandatory on UK-registered yachts from 1 January 2027, and MCA Safety Bulletin 35, updated 15 November 2024, found that a container advertised as fully MGN 681 compliant was not able to comply fully and warned that no international standard governs these products.

Who it is for: Owners who want a fast board with no petrol aboard and no engine to service, and who are willing to buy the second and third battery up front.