The Guy Behind the Lessons: Meet Paul Andrus, Lake Life eFoils Founder

Paul has been on these lakes long enough to know which ones behave and which ones don't.

He knows which bays stay calm when the wind swings west, which stretches of Leelanau shoreline work in the morning before chop builds, and which private docks give a beginner enough room to fall without worrying about anything. That knowledge is not something you pick up in a season or two. It comes from growing up on this water.

Where does Paul Andrus come from, and why does it matter for your lesson?

When conditions shift mid-lesson, Paul is not consulting a map. He moves the group and the reason it feels seamless is because he already knows where they are going.

If you are coming up from downstate or flying in for a long weekend, Lake Life's mobile lesson model is built around exactly this. Paul's team comes to you. Where you launch depends on where you are staying and what the water is doing that morning. That call is easier when the person making it has been reading these lakes for over a decade.

How did a kiteboarder with no eFoil experience end up teaching hundreds of people to fly?

His first time on an eFoil was in March. St. Joseph, Michigan. Cold enough that most people would have stayed onshore. He went out with a friend who had already been foiling and watched him pick it up immediately and ride off. Paul spent about 80 percent of that session in the water.

Defeated, tired, frustrated. He drove home.

He went back the next day. That session he was in the water maybe 20 percent of the time. By the end of the weekend the board was starting to make sense, and so was something else: the gap between day one and day two had almost nothing to do with physical ability. His body had simply needed one night to catch up to what his brain already understood. That gap, he figured, was closeable for almost anyone with the right instruction behind them.

His kiting background helped him see it. On a windless summer day in Northern Michigan, you either stay home or you find something else to ride. eFoiling was that something else. The foiling mechanics translated. The patience required to learn a board sport did not surprise him. What surprised him was how fast other people could get there when someone was talking them through it in real time instead of shouting from the dock.

That is the thing he filed away from his own learning curve: the sport looks impossible from the shore. From the board, with the right person behind you, it is mostly a matter of committing to it. Most people have the concept within an hour. The next part, as Paul puts it, is just tricking your body into doing something it is not used to doing yet.

That realization is what Lake Life eFoils is built on. Not the boards, not the location. The belief that almost anyone can get up, and that the instructor's job is to close the gap between what a first-timer thinks is possible and what actually is.

What does Paul actually do during a eFoil lesson, and why does it work?

Every Lake Life lesson follows the same sequence, and the reason it works is that the sequence was built from watching what goes wrong when you skip a step.

Step 1 — Before anyone gets in the water

A few days before your lesson, Paul sends instructional videos. Two to three minutes, covers the basics: how to start, how to stand, what the controller does. It sounds like a small thing. It is not. By the time people show up for the land session, Paul can tell within the first few minutes who watched the video and who did not.

"If they're asking what the controller does during the land lesson, I already know. And if they know exactly what it does and where to stand, I know that lesson is going to go well."

The land session runs about 15 minutes before anyone touches the water. Footing stance, weight distribution, how to fall safely, what the board feels like before it lifts. Paul figures out goofy vs. regular footed early, because getting that wrong in the water costs time. His first year he was sorting that out after people had already fallen twice.

Step 2 — In the water

Paul uses BB Talkin waterproof headsets for every lesson. Before he had them, he was on shore shouting. The headset changed the whole model. He can talk a rider through the exact moment the board starts to lift, catch the weight shift before it goes wrong, and keep a nervous kid calm when they drift over deep water.

Step 3 — What separates a good eFoil lesson from a great one

Listening. That is Paul's answer, and it is more specific than it sounds. The students who progress fastest are not the ones with board sport backgrounds. They are the ones who show up having watched the video, pay attention during the land session, and are willing to fall a couple of times without deciding the sport is not for them.

Is there an age limit for eFoil lessons?

The most common question Paul gets from families booking a lesson is some version of this: is my kid old enough, or am I too old. Five years of lessons across the Leelanau Peninsula and Grand Traverse area have given him a clear answer to both.

How young is too young to eFoil?

For the first couple of years, Lake Life's youngest students were around 14. Paul was still learning to teach and did not have headsets yet, which meant managing a young kid in the water from the shore with no direct communication. He was not comfortable pushing younger than that.

Then the Blowfish came out. It is a rubber training ring that wraps around the board, increases its buoyancy significantly, and changes what is possible for small riders. With the Blowfish on the board and the controller throttled down to one or two miles per hour, a five or six year old can stand on the board and move across the water without the speed or instability that makes eFoiling challenging for adults.

The first time Paul ran a lesson with a kid that young on Long Lake in Traverse City, the child was up and nearly on foil within 15 minutes. Every adult in the group watched it happen. Every one of them was in the water immediately after.

For younger kids who get nervous drifting over deep water, Paul stays on the headset the whole time. "I'm right behind you" is usually enough to settle a scared seven-year-old down. The headset makes that possible in a way that shouting from the dock never could.

The Blowfish also has handles built into it, which helps riders of any age who have physical limitations getting from kneeling to standing. Paul keeps neoprene knee pads in the lesson bag for anyone whose knees need the extra support. These are details he learned from the water, not from a manual.

How old is too old to eFoil in Michigan?

The oldest student Paul has taught was 75. He came off the board with the same expression as that six-year-old on Long Lake. Paul mentions both of them in the same breath because that range is the point.

Last summer Paul ran a 10-person lesson in the rain. The group ranged from 7 to 73 years old. The lesson ran anyway. Everyone got on the water.

Physical limitations do come up with older riders, particularly for anyone who has had knee replacements or rebuilt joints. Getting from kneeling to standing on the board is the hardest transition in a lesson. When that is a real constraint, Paul adjusts the approach. The Blowfish handles give riders something to push from. The throttle stays low. The land session focuses on what that specific person needs to know before they touch the water.

The students who take the longest to click are not the oldest people in the group. They are almost always adults in their 40s and 50s who arrive expecting to figure it out on their own terms and skipped the pre-lesson video. Age is not the variable. Willingness to be a beginner for an hour is.

Beyond the one-off lesson

Lake Life's biggest single booking was a group of 40 people. The regular summer sessions run eight to twelve people, when one person is struggling, the rest of the group starts coaching them. Ego and friendly competition move people faster than instruction sometimes does.

Not every session is a paid booking. Paul ran a pro bono lesson last summer for a group of 15 to 17-year-olds from Forest Area Hills School, kids who had spent the year in shop class building their own skateboards, out at Taylor Park on Long Lake. He donates lessons regularly for silent auctions and community fundraisers across the peninsula.

What is it about Northern Michigan water that keeps Paul coming back?

Paul has kited and foiled in Aruba, Bonaire, St. Croix, Hood River, Puerto Rico, and along the coast of Mexico. He was in St. Croix a month and a half before this interview. Down in Malecon the week before it. He thinks about Michigan the whole time he is gone.

"I just can't wait to get home."

That is not nostalgia talking. Paul has a specific reason freshwater changes how he rides. In saltwater, when he wants to try something new or push into a trick he knows he is going to crash, he holds back. Sharks. Rays. The things you do not think about until you are sitting low in the water waiting for a board to drift back to you. In freshwater, he tries anything. The risk calculus is completely different, and it changes how far he is willing to push a session.

For students, the same logic applies. Northern Michigan inland lakes are calm, clear, and closed systems. In Sutton's Bay you can be in 40 or 50 feet of water and see your shadow on the bottom. Torch Lake runs almost Caribbean blue on a clear day. Out in front of Sleeping Bear Dunes, you are riding in sight of one of the most photographed shorelines in the Midwest. None of those bodies of water have tides, significant swells, or anything underneath them that is going to make a first-timer think twice about falling in.

Michigan also has over 11,000 inland lakes. Paul cites that number often because it is the foundation of how Lake Life operates. The mobile lesson model works because the water is everywhere. You are never more than a few miles from a body of water anywhere in the state. When one location is choppy, Paul moves the group. When wind comes from the wrong direction on Grand Traverse Bay, he knows which sheltered stretch of Leelanau shoreline stays flat. That flexibility is geographic, and it is something no fixed-location lesson operation can replicate.

The season is short, which Paul acknowledges freely. June can run cold enough for wetsuits through most of July. But August settles in, and September is what Paul calls one of the best months on the water anywhere. The crowds thin out, the water holds its warmth from the summer, and the conditions tend to be some of the cleanest of the year. Paul keeps wetsuits, gloves, and booties in the lesson kit. In a nod to how seriously the local community takes the experience, his friend Vlad runs Sleeping Bear Saunas and has brought a portable sauna to the beach during lessons so students can warm up between sessions.

Paul spent a week during Kiteboard for Cancer bouncing between spots down the Michigan coastline instead of flying somewhere else. He logged over 300 miles that week, the most of anyone in the event, and raised the most money. He and the group agreed afterward it was one of the best weeks of kiting any of them had ever had. They had been going to the Outer Banks, South Padre, Mexico. They stayed in Michigan and thought it was better.

Michigan does not show up on kite maps of the world. Paul knows this and thinks it is about to change. For anyone looking to get on the water in Northern Michigan this summer, that window of it being genuinely undiscovered is part of what makes it worth doing now.

What does Paul want to build in Michigan that doesn't exist yet?

Five years ago there was no eFoil industry in Northern Michigan. Paul knows this because he was there at the start of it, in the water in March with his first paying student, both of them figuring it out together. That student is one of his closest friends now. He lives on North Lake, bought three boards, and his family has been on the water with Lake Life ever since.

That is the thread Paul keeps pulling on. Not just lessons booked and boards sold, but what happens after someone gets on the water for the first time and realizes the sport is accessible, the community is open, and Michigan is one of the best places in the world to ride. He wants that to add up to something bigger than it currently does.

What he describes is a unified Michigan foil and kite community, not the isolated pockets that exist now. Kiteboarders in Charlevoix who do not know the winging scene in Grand Haven. eFoilers on Torch Lake who have never connected with anyone on the east side of the state. Events that move down the coastline instead of staying in one spot. A single community across eFoiling, foiling, kiteboarding, and winging that recognizes it is all the same thing.

"We're all best friends at the beach. There's no reason why we can't support each other's businesses and lifestyles."

In three to five years, Paul wants to run Lake Life more full-time. Summers in Northern Michigan, winters somewhere warm. He is not in a rush about it. The season is short and the work is real, and he is clear-eyed about both. But he is building toward something, and the lesson operation is the foundation of it.

And if eFoiling turns into something more for you, the way it did for that first student who rode all day with cardboard still stuffed in his booties, Paul is probably the right person to talk to about what comes next.

Frequently Asked Questions