Leaving those stand-up paddleboarders in the proverbial dust, these new battery-powered boards will let you cruise lakes, rivers, cannals and other bodies of water all without that formerly-critical ingredient: waves.

The Spanish surf company Onean has unveiled two models, the Carver and Manta, respectively designed for serious surfers to slalom across calm water and to let more casual surfers to smoothly explore still surfaces in remote places.

Each version has speed controls tied to a handheld remote and optional foot slots for greater traction. A third model, the Blade, is also in production but details about the board have yet to be released.

The Carver owes its look to the classic longboard and its speed (around 5 miles per hour) to an interchangeable onboard battery powering an axial water pump. The wider Manta has is slightly slower and wider, made for cruising.

The battery life on the faster variant is only 20 minutes, at which point it can be swapped with a spare, but the latter has more energy storage, allowing for up to 2 hours of travel and enabling more ambitious explorations.

Aside from obvious coastal uses (like providing a backup board on calm days at the beach), electric boards can bring an entirely new sport to landlocked but water-covered places like Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

Submerged sea vessels have long been destinations for diving tourists or (intentional or accidental) marine life habitats, but what if they could serve some function still visible on the surface of the water, like a memorial to those lost when the ship sunk?

The New Concordia Island Contest winners, Alexander Laing and Francesco Matteo Belfiore, propose slicing the section of the Italian cruise ship that crashed in January of 2012 and planting a garden in the resulting voids, leaving the lower, still-submerged areas as habitat zones.

The contest itself “aims to rethink the disaster of the ship Costa Concordia as exceptional opportunity to imagine the future of the wreck and that of the Island of Giglio. It is also a chance to wonder about needs for architecture to build new landscapes on traces and remains of a traumatic event …. The jury has selected the projects that have responded in a more comprehensive way to the questions raised by the contest, interweaving visionaries contents to pragmatic and real solutions.”

The clean and simple solution of the winning proposal defers to both nature and humans, a tribute to the disaster as well as the lives lost. Other intervention propositions of runner-up submissions trended toward either extreme: leaving the wreck mainly as-is and building around it, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, creating underwater passageways and making the remaining structure physically accessible to people.