Nette Klement | Surf Coach & Destination Manager
From Holland
What is your role in the Salty Souls Experience?
I’m so excited to be sharing my passion for the ocean and surfing with you! My goal is to be the surf coach I wish I had when I started surfing. I wanna be stoked together but also help you improve as much as possible and give you the knowledge you need when you wanna go surfing on your own. I wanna show you that surfing isn’t just a sport and that it’s quite easy to get addicted to it. Watch out: it can change your life! (But in a good kinda way!)
What’s your background and how did you acquire those skills?
As a kid I always dreamt of becoming a teacher. And as a kid I was always really into any kinda sport. It only took me one week to fall in love with snowboarding and that made me decide I wanted to become a snowboard teacher. So after I finished high school, I did my homework instructor course and spend the winter working in Austria.
In that year I also had my first surfing experience; I was hooked from then on and so I came up with the idea that I wanted to spend my summer getting better at it. So I started working at a surf camp; doing lots of dishes and other ‘shitty’ jobs, so I got to be at a place where I could surf every day.
It took me some years; travelling wherever the waves were good and I could work, looooots of wipe out, frustration and dedication. But when I finally fell confident enough with my surfing skills, I did my surf instructor course and so, my life as a surf teacher started. It’s been 5 years now and I still fr*cking love it!
Biggest challenge within the Salty Souls Experience?
As a surf coach I find it a real challenge to not be upset when conditions aren’t great. With surfing you’re always depending on the waves and the weather. Of course we will try and pick the best moments to go surfing, but unfortunately we can’t change conditions.
As a person my biggest challenge might be to be with a group of beautiful women and stay confident. I know I’ve always been hanging with the boys more, because there are a lot of women that impress me so much that I’ll feel less confident. I really wanna be able to say to myself: ‘She’s beautiful, but so am I.’ instead of ‘She’s beautiful and how do I measure up to her?’
Ninja super skill people don’t know you possess?
I’m not sure we could call this a ‘skill’, but people are always surprised by how long I can be out in the water surfing without having a break. When the waves are good, it’s like my body doesn’t need anything else than salty water, I will always be saying: ‘one more’, while hours are passing by.
Favorite place in the world?
I fall in love with places easily. Everywhere I go I’ll find the good things about it, which always makes it hard for me to leave.
But at this moment the place that really stole my heart is a little village in the North of Spain, where the mountains are kissing the ocean and the people in the village feel like family. I’ve been working there for 5 summers now and every time I come back there I have this strong feeling of coming home.
What gets you the most excited in life?
The easiest answer I could give would be: sunsets. It doesn’t matter where, how, with who, but seeing the sun go down, always makes me feel thankful for another beautiful (or not so great) day, it stops the time for a bit, stops my thoughts, it makes me feel alive.
What is the craziest thing you’ve ever done?
If you would ask my friends, all of them would tell you another crazy story of me being way too drunk and doing weird, embarrassing stuff that I usually don’t remember. Alcohol isn’t my best friend, and ever since I accepted that, my life got a lot more boring than before.
When you would ask my mom, she would probably say that going on my own, as a 18-year-old blond girl, to South America without any plan, I just wanted to go surfing and learn Spanish, was the craziest thing I’ve done. And if you ask me, it might just be: chasing my dreams, because sometimes they were pretty crazy.
