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"The sea and art are my two lungs."
For those who love foiling, there's no longer any need to watch the sky to run to the beach… “With e-foiling, you can glide when there's wind and waves, and when there isn't, the submerged wing is equipped with an electric motor, with Performance models reaching speeds of up to 50 km/h,” explains Loïc Deltour, co-founder of the Plume brand. Based in Le Rouret, Deltour is a child of the sea and a polyglot: “My father, a photographer, had sailed around the world twice before meeting my mother and building his sailboat, on which I was conceived. We crossed the Atlantic, and I lived in the Caribbean until I was 20. I went to school half the year in Martinique, and during hurricane season, my mother took over and taught me on board.” A coastal voyage that led the sailor to his engineering school in Sophia-Antipolis, then to Texas Instruments, where at CES in Las Vegas he signed a project to launch Wireless LAN… Wi-Fi was still in its infancy on mobile. “People talked to me about France, but I didn’t know much about its culture. As a Martinican living abroad, I felt like an empty shell. So when I returned to mainland France, I enrolled in theater and opera classes, I started sculpting and filming, and art became the second pillar of my life,” recalls Loïc, who worked for the Catherine Issert and Joel Guyot galleries, then the CAB Foundation, and contributed to the launch of the Saint-Paul de Vence International Biennial.
The Plume adventure began after Covid; Loïc had just lost his father: “One day, I told my friend Mathieu Malvieux that I dreamed of making a paddleboard using bio-based materials and the waste we collected with the Paddle Cleaner association.” The singer took him at his word, produced it, and that's how our engineer embarked on the adventure of making paddleboards.
Founded with his two partners, Etienne and Pascal, Plume invents hybrid, modular, and eco-friendly e-foils. An external rotor system eliminates the need for oil in the motor. The French brand, based in La Bouilladisse, has a team of pro riders competing in the SFT World Cup. On the French Riviera, the first e-foil world championships will take place during the Blue Days, from September 11th to 13th in Villefranche-sur-Mer.
A project that also surfs with the world of art, since artists are invited to recycle old e-foils into totem works.
