By Jana Bomhoff
A surf coaching trip in the Maldives promises flawless conditions. It delivers something harder to look at.
The boat leaves before sunrise. By the time the atoll’s first break appears on the horizon – a clean, peeling right with no one on it – the light is pink and the water is the colour of old glass. There is nothing else to say. This is the Maldives delivering on its promise, and the promise, it turns out, is only the beginning of the problem.
The eight of us on this liveaboard have paid good money to be here. We are competent surfers – seven men, one woman – most somewhere in our thirties and forties, all of us, it must be said, operating under a comfortable fiction about how well we surf. We have arrived with footage in our heads of ourselves doing things we almost certainly cannot do. The Maldives is excellent at confirming such fictions. The waves are consistent, uncrowded, warm. There are no bad days to blame. What we did not fully account for was Mitch.
Mitch du Preez is twenty-two years old and grew up in Jeffreys Bay, South Africa – one of the most demanding surf towns on earth. He won the South African junior national title at eighteen, represented his country at ISA World Juniors, and spent the better part of his teenage years chasing a ranking on the WSL Qualifying Series.
Then his parents sat him down. They have always stressed the importance of having a good education. Even once he started to gain some momentum in his competitive surfing, the deal remained that he needed to get a degree first.
Today, he calls it the best advice he ever received. It didn’t feel that way at the time. “All my identity was in surfing,” he says, sitting at the stern of the boat the evening after our last session, the Indian Ocean going dark behind him. “When I went to university, I felt like everyone forgot about me.” He pauses. “I had all this self-doubt.”
“I was so scared to lose that it ripped the enjoyment out of surfing.” – MITCH DU PREEZ, COACH
What saved him – or at least reframed everything – was a film. In his final year of competing, he shifted focus from results to footage. He was making an edit, obsessing over clips rather than scorecards. The pressure evaporated. He had his best competitive season of his career. “Having no pressure,” he says, and laughs at the simplicity of it. “Just enjoying the process.”
He stopped competing seriously not long after. He went to Sri Lanka instead, took a head coaching job, and pushed beginners into whitewater for the first time. He didn’t expect what happened next. “I never thought that seeing someone stand up and go straight – seeing them so happy – would make me so happy.” He shakes his head. “That clicked.”
Simon Hartley, the founder of Renegade Surf Travel, did not grow up near the surf. He started surfing at sixteen in North Wales – a two hour drive from his home in the NW of England and as far from a surf culture as you can get. He kept going anyway, not out of love, at first, but out of something more stubborn: his friends were going, and he couldn’t bear the thought of them getting good at something without him.
“It wasn’t competitiveness exactly,” he says. “More fear of missing out.” He laughs. “I’d just go with them. Even though I didn’t like the beach.”
This all changed after catching his first unbroken wave, and like many of us, completely altered the course of his life.
Nearly a decade later, he founded Renegade in 2018, after a scouting trip to the Maldives the year before. He’d already been thinking about the gap in the market – surf schools for beginners, coaching for pros, and almost nothing in between – when he saw the waves here. “Quality, user-friendly breaks,” he says. “Even without coaching, everyone on that first trip improved. The waves did it.” He saw what happened when you added real instruction on top of that. The idea locked in.
Mitch himself came to Renegade through the right wave at the right moment. Simon spotted him surfing in the North Malé Atoll, and knew immediately. “For me, a big part of it is the vibe,” Simon says. “You’re on a boat in a confined space for ten days. Yes, they need to be a good coach – but they need to be a good person to be around.” Mitch was both. A mutual contact made the introduction, Mitch sent an email a few months later, and the rest followed from there.
Renegade is built on a simple, almost brutal thesis: most recreational surfers spend thousands on trips and come home surfing exactly the same. The liveaboard format fixes the externals – warm water, empty lineups, little to no crowds. Coaching fixes the internal. Video analysis every evening on the big screen. One-on-one sessions. A pre-trip questionnaire that Mitch reads less like a skills form and more like a psychological brief.
“You get people who say they’re better than they are – and others who almost understate themselves.” – MITCH DU PREEZ
“It gives you a gauge of how confident they are as a person,” Mitch says of the pre-trip questionnaire. “Where they have egos. Where they are.” He pauses. “But it always comes down to the first surf.”
The first group video session is the hardest. Mitch knows this and watches for it – the moment the footage comes up on screen and a face changes. “Everyone’s smiling on the outside,” he says, “crying on the inside.” Most of us have never actually watched ourselves surf. The gap between the surfer we imagine and the surfer we see is, in most cases, significant.
The breakthrough, when it comes, usually arrives around day three or four. Something shifts. A guest starts watching the footage differently – not wincing at what’s wrong, but recognizing what’s starting to work. “When people get to the point where they’re actually satisfied watching themselves surf,” Mitch says, “that’s when they really start to progress.”
He is precise about the split between mental and technical coaching. As a coach, he operates about eighty percent in the technical register. But for the guest, he says, the ratio inverts. “As a student, it’s probably sixty to seventy percent mental.” The technique is real, but the barrier is usually something older – fear, ego, the belief that you either belong in a lineup or you don’t.
In the water, he coaches differently than on land. On land, he is analytical, precise, step-by-step. In the lineup, he strips almost all of it back. “If you overthink things in the water, it gets in your head,” he says. He encourages. He positions. He sits alongside the person struggling most and waits for the right wave – not the biggest, not the most impressive, but the one that suits where they are right now. “Just trying to help more with the experience in the water,” he says. “Then more technical on land.”
On the last evening, with the boat anchored in a flat-calm channel and the day’s final session behind us, Mitch is asked what coaching has taught him that competing never could. He sits with it for a moment.
“To be happy with imperfection,” he says finally. He describes watching guests erupt with joy over a wave that professionals wouldn’t bother filming – a clean drop, a bottom turn held for two seconds, a ride that ends without falling. “That’s the pure love of surfing,” he says. “That’s what you’re going for.” He’s learned to see it again through them. The perfectionism that made competition toxic – the fear of the closed-out turn, the missed air – has softened. “If I fall off a wave now, I’m like: I’m in the ocean. I’ll get another one.”
The perfect wave does not make you better. It just makes it harder to pretend you already are. For ten days in the South Atolls, eight surfers found that out – one screen session, one honest wave, one patient coach at a time.
About Renegade Surf Travel
Founded in 2018 by Simon Hartley, and run together with Dale Wallington, Renegade combines world-class coaching with world-class waves, delivering a structured progression framework from a liveaboard in the Maldives.
This is not a surf camp or group holiday. It is focused surf development: consistent waves, video analysis, progressive feedback, one-to-one coaching and a clear plan for improvement. Over 1,000 guests later, Renegade’s purpose remains simple: put surfers in the right waves, with the right coach, and make sure the trip actually changes their surfing.
This article was produced in collaboration Renegade Surf Travel