SEABOB (Cayago)

Cayago, and where the thing is actually made

Cayago AG was founded in 2007 and has built one product family ever since. The registered office is at Flachter Strasse 32 in Stuttgart and the machines are made at Benzstrasse 10 in Bad Salzuflen in North Rhine-Westphalia, with sales offices in Fort Lauderdale and Singapore. Everything an owner touches is assembled in Germany, which is a large part of what the price buys.

The company sells the SEABOB as engineered equipment and not as a pool toy, and the position has held. Ask a captain what is in the toy locker and the SEABOB is usually named before anything else. The competitive threat has always been cheap sea scooters, and Cayago's answer has been to keep moving the performance up and to keep manufacturing at home.

The F9, and what actually changed

The F5 ran for more than ten years and is still the machine most owners have. In January 2025 Cayago presented the third generation at boot in Dusseldorf, developed with Studio F. A. Porsche and rebuilt underneath. The headline is weight. An F5 S weighed about 35 kg and the F9 S weighs 25.9 kg, with the plain F9 at 22.9 kg, achieved with titanium, magnesium and ceramic coatings.

Nine kilos matters more than it sounds. A SEABOB has to be lifted off the swim platform by hand, usually by a stewardess or a guest, and 35 kg wet and slippery is a two-person job that produces dropped machines and hurt backs. The F9 also gained a driving stability system with side wings and extractable rear wings, standard on the S and an option on the F9.

One SEABOB and one charger buys a single forty-minute session before lunch and nothing at all afterwards.

Thrust performance, and the number Cayago will not publish

Cayago rates its machines on a proprietary TP scale instead of newtons or knots. The F9 is 60 TP from a 2.6 kW motor and the F9 S is 84 TP from 3.6 kW, which is about 40 percent more. Both have three modes, Normal, Dive and Sport, and a digital thumb throttle with stepless control.

What Cayago does not publish is a top speed for either boat. At the F9 launch the press was told the machines would do well over 20 km/h, which is a little over 10 knots, and no official figure has followed. Any owner comparing a SEABOB against a rival sea scooter on speed is comparing one published number against an absent one. The honest comparison is thrust, weight and how long the thing runs.

Run time, charge time and the pack that does not come out

A standard F9 gives about 40 minutes of enthusiastic riding, about 60 with the Battery Capacity Plus upgrade at EUR 847.24 gross, and the F9 S gives about 50 on its larger 1.2 kWh pack. Standard charging takes four to six hours. The quick charger brings that down to about an hour and a half and is a separate purchase, at EUR 1,752.30 gross on a Mediterranean dealer's May 2026 list. Run those figures against a day at anchor and one machine on the standard charger yields a single session before lunch and nothing after it.

The structural difference from an eFoil is that the SEABOB battery is integrated and does not come out. There is no spare pack to swap, none appears on Cayago's EMEA list of September 2025 or on the Maltese dealer list of May 2026, and no replacement price is published anywhere. Charge time is therefore a hard ceiling on the day rather than a logistics problem, and the only answer is more machines. When a pack fails out of warranty the route is a specialist rebuild, offered by yacht toy servicers and independent battery shops that advertise SEABOB cell and management-board work, and none of them publishes a price either. Budget for the fleet, and budget for the fact that a dead battery is a workshop job on a machine that cost five figures.

Depth, and who is allowed on one

Dealer specification sheets give a maximum dive depth electronically adjustable up to 30 m, with an automatic cut-out that returns the machine towards the surface. Buoyancy is positive by design, so a rider who lets go watches it come back up to him. There is no exposed propeller and no exhaust, which is why crew will hand one to a guest a hundred metres from swimmers.

No licence or certification exists for riding one. That cuts both ways. A confident swimmer with a mask picks it up in five minutes, and a nervous guest who dives at 25 m holding a machine that pulls hard is in genuine difficulty. Crew brief every rider, set the depth limit in the electronics before handing it over, and keep the tender in the water when guests are using them.

The SE63 for Lamborghini

Cayago has built a licensed special edition with Automobili Lamborghini, and it is a different machine. The SE63 runs a 6.3 kW motor at 162 TP, nearly three times the plain F9, weighs 35 kg, runs about 60 minutes and is quoted at 35 km/h, roughly 19 knots, with the optional rear-mounted Performance Board fitted. Production started in the second quarter of 2026 with deliveries from that summer.

The 63 refers to 1963, when Ferruccio Lamborghini founded the car company. A figure of 63 knots circulates on social media and on review aggregators and appears nowhere in Cayago's technical documentation. The SE63 is allocation only and priced on application, in six Lamborghini finishes not offered on the standard machines.

What it costs, and when that was quoted

Cayago's EMEA list of September 2025 puts the F9 at EUR 9,285 net of VAT and the F9 S at EUR 12,380 net. A Mediterranean dealer publishing Maltese gross figures in May 2026 showed EUR 10,956.30 for the F9 and EUR 14,608.40 for the F9 S with 18 percent VAT applied. Every regional number moves with the tax rate and the exchange rate, so the net figure is the one to compare.

The options are not trivial against the base price. The same 2026 list showed Battery Capacity Plus at about EUR 847 gross, the driving stability system at about EUR 490 on the F9, a lifting dock at about EUR 1,095, a rack at about EUR 348, a bag at about EUR 352 and a cover at about EUR 99. Add the quick charger and a spare battery and a well-equipped F9 S lands close to EUR 20,000.

Lithium aboard, and which flags it actually binds

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency issued MGN 681 (M) Amendment 1 on 19 December 2025, covering fire safety, stowage and charging of small electrically powered craft and their lithium-ion batteries aboard yachts. Under it, lithium-ion batteries may only be charged aboard inside a certified container or space, any spare or removed battery above 100 Wh must sit in a dedicated cabinet built to EN 14470, EN 16121 or EN 16122, and from 1 January 2027 those containers on UK-registered vessels must carry UK type approval from a nominated body. The reach is wider than the initials suggest, because MGN 681 sits on Part A Chapter 14 of the Red Ensign Group Yacht Code, and the Red Ensign Group is not only the United Kingdom. The Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, the Isle of Man and the other British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies register under the same code, so a Cayman-flagged yacht is already inside Chapter 14. The Cayman Islands Shipping Registry goes further than the Code. 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 that carries them, so a surveyor works to Chapter 14, that note and a vessel-specific risk assessment together.

The two flags outside the Red Ensign Group have moved separately and unevenly. The Republic of the Marshall Islands rewrote Yacht Code MI-103 with a 2026 edition effective 1 January 2026, and that edition introduces specific rules for spaces used to store or charge lithium-ion powered toys and tenders, so an RMI yacht now has a code requirement of its own rather than a borrowed one. Malta moved earlier and more softly. Transport Malta's Merchant Shipping Directorate issued a Commercial Yachting Notice on battery charging and storage aboard commercial yachts dated 22 June 2022, and Information Notice 45 on lithium-ion battery fires dated 7 September 2022, both framed as strong recommendation, with the firm requirement being that any suspect or defective pack is landed immediately and that deviations from the Commercial Yacht Code need the administration's approval. A Maltese yacht is surveyed against the Commercial Yacht Code, at its 2025 revision, not against MGN 681. The practical answer for an owner buying three SEABOBs is that the charging arrangement should be built to the strictest of the three, because flags change hands more often than garages get rebuilt.

Warranty, service and the alternatives

Cayago gives 24 months from transfer, batteries included and without a separate cycle limit, registered to the original purchaser. The warranty requires an annual inspection at an authorised facility and excludes use outside normal use, which is the clause that matters to anyone chartering the yacht. Declare the charter profile to Cayago before delivery, because those cases are assessed individually. Opening or modifying the machine voids it outright.

The rivals are the electric surfboards and the foils, not other sea scooters, because they compete for the same platform time and the same charging locker. A SEABOB works for a guest who cannot ride anything, at any age, with five minutes of instruction, which is where Awake, Fliteboard, Lift Foils and JetSurf all lose. It also does not get anyone out of the water, and after twenty minutes some guests want to stand up.

What class and the IMO add, and what they do not

Nothing at the International Maritime Organization binds a water toy today. The IMO's work on lithium-ion batteries has run through 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, eleven of which were confirmed for further work, and MSC 110, sitting from 18 to 27 June 2025, closed the review of regulatory barriers. None of that has yet produced a mandatory instrument reaching a 1.2 kWh sled in a yacht garage, and an owner told that the IMO requires something should ask which instrument.

Class arrives at the same place from a different direction. DNV's Battery (Safety) notation becomes mandatory where installed battery capacity exceeds 50 kWh in aggregate, which is more than forty times an F9 S pack, so a locker full of toys never triggers it. What the societies have produced is advice rather than rule. 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. DNV, Lloyd's Register, RINA, Bureau Veritas and ABS formed a Yacht Safety and Environmental Consortium in 2024. The obligation a yacht is actually surveyed against still comes from the flag, not from class and not from the IMO.

What the certified charging space costs

No manufacturer of a marine lithium charging locker publishes a price. The active-suppression systems yacht suppliers sell against MGN 681, the RACLAN boxes and the modular RAMBSS, and the passive ZARGES BatterySafe cases, were all quotation only in July 2026. The published prices that do exist are for shore-side industrial cabinets built to EN 14470-1 Type 90, which is one of the standards MGN 681 names for spare-battery stowage. A German supplier listed an asecos ION-CHARGE 90 with pull-out shelves at EUR 3,270 net of VAT in July 2026, and a United Kingdom supplier listed the taller asecos ION-CORE-90 at GBP 4,571.04 net or GBP 5,485.25 gross. Those figures set the order of magnitude for a box, not the cost of a compliant installation.

The SEABOB makes the problem harder than an eFoil does, because the battery does not come out. The ION-CHARGE 90 has an internal envelope of 470 by 452 by 582 mm and shelves rated at 25 kg, which suits a removable eFoil pack and will not take a sea sled. On a SEABOB the certified space has to be a compartment designed into the yacht rather than a cabinet bought and bolted down, and that is a refit drawing and a yard bill rather than a purchase order. One warning belongs alongside any quotation. In Safety Bulletin 35, updated 15 November 2024, the MCA found that a lithium storage container marketed as fully compliant with MGN 681 was not able to comply fully, stated that no international standard governs these products, and advised that any certification a manufacturer claims should be viewed with caution.

Who it is for: Owners with mixed-ability guests aboard who want a water toy that a grandparent and a twelve-year-old can both ride after a five-minute briefing.