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About Jeroen Mutsaars

1 of the people behind Swell — and every trip report in the Journal.

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The founder

Jeroen Mutsaars

Co-founder and co-owner of Swell, a surf and watersports retreat in Cabarete, Dominican Republic, that he and his wife Clare built from bare land in 2009.

Co-owner, with Clare
Based in Europe, in Cabarete every season
Swell since 2009
Dutch, English, Spanish, Indonesian
Jeroen Mutsaars, co-founder of Swell surf retreat

Jeroen didn’t buy a surf retreat. He built one.

Jeroen is Dutch. In 2004 he left a conventional career in the Netherlands to build his life around surfing and travel. That wasn’t a gap year. It was the decision the rest of this story runs on.

For several years he ran one of the first European surf travel companies, Surferdream.com and GlobalSurfers.com, booking trips and visiting surf resorts and camps around the world. Seeing dozens of them up close taught him where the market split. The cheap camps were fun but rough. The comfortable resorts were pleasant but rarely got you actually surfing. Almost nobody was doing both well: real coaching, real comfort, one price, no fuss.

So in early 2009 he and his wife Clare stopped looking for a place to buy and decided to make their own. They bought land in Cabarete and hired award-winning Swiss architect Silke Sadeghi to design the retreat from the ground up. Swell opened its doors that October.

Since then, over 6,000 guests have learned to surf, kitesurf and wingfoil at Swell, most of them adults arriving with no watersports background at all. Cabarete was a deliberate choice, not a postcard one: a consistent, forgiving beach break, warm water year round, and steady wind that make it one of the best places in the Caribbean to stand up for the first time.

Today, Jeroen and Clare own Swell. Haudy Retamal, from Chile, runs the day-to-day operations on the ground in Cabarete, and Swell’s coaches do the teaching. Jeroen looks after the business side from Europe: the marketing, the website, and most of what you read on this site. He’s in Cabarete every season, but he’ll be the first to tell you he’s not the one pushing you into your first wave.

Jeroen Mutsaars

  • 2009Year Jeroen and Clare opened Swell
  • 15+Seasons as owners of the retreat
  • 6,000+Guests who learned a watersport at Swell
  • 6Watersports he rides himself

How Swell came to be

A life pointed at the water

  1. 2004

    Left a conventional career in the Netherlands to build a life around surfing and travel. Started spending real time in the water rather than reading about it.

  2. Before Swell

    Ran a surf-travel company, sending travellers to surf resorts and camps and visiting them himself. Saw first-hand what worked, what didn’t, and the gap nobody was filling: proper coaching and proper comfort, together, at a fair price.

  3. 2009

    Bought land in Cabarete with his wife Clare and hired an award-winning Swiss architect to design and build a retreat from scratch. Swell opened that October, purpose-built for adults learning from zero.

  4. Since 2009

    Swell has hosted thousands of guests learning to surf, kitesurf and wingfoil. Jeroen and Clare chose Cabarete for its consistent waves, warm water and beginner-friendly beach break, and folded wingfoiling into the programme the moment it arrived.

  5. Today

    Owns Swell with Clare, with Haudy running operations in Cabarete and a team of coaches doing the teaching. Jeroen handles marketing, the website and the writing, and keeps the whole place pointed at one thing: getting a first-timer up and riding inside a single week.



What stands behind the writing

Fifteen seasons of owning it, not describing it

  • He built the place, brick to booking

    Swell wasn’t bought as a going concern. Jeroen and Clare designed and built it, and have owned and shaped it ever since, with Haudy running operations day to day. When he writes about surf holidays, it’s from building and owning one.

  • He knows the exact reader he writes for

    Most guests are adults with no watersports background and limited holiday time. Fifteen-plus seasons of watching Swell’s coaches get exactly those people standing up, and hearing what guests say afterwards, sits behind every “how to learn” article on this site.

  • He rides everything he recommends

    Surfing, wingfoiling, kitesurfing, windsurfing, prone foiling and sailing. The kit advice and the “is this for me” answers come from doing the sport, not repeating a brochure.

  • He has watched one beach for fifteen seasons

    Season after season in and around Cabarete: when it’s a wave day, when the wind wins, which corner of the bay suits someone standing up for the first time. Local knowledge, measured in years.

“Cabarete is the ideal playground for wind and watersports!”

On the water

A waterman first, an owner second

Jeroen doesn’t just own the place. He rides everything Swell teaches and a fair bit it doesn’t. That breadth shapes what Swell offers: which sports make the programme, what kit is in the shed, and when the wind is the better call than the waves.

It’s also why the site’s advice is honest about trade-offs. Someone who only surfs will tell you to surf. Someone who has spent years across every discipline can tell you which one actually fits your week, your fitness and the forecast.

  • Surfing
  • Wingfoiling
  • Kitesurfing
  • Windsurfing
  • Prone foiling
  • Sailing
  • Stand up paddle boarding
  • Snowboarding, come winter

Jeroen Mutsaars

Languages

Guests come from everywhere. So does he.

Jeroen is fluent in four languages (5 if you can’t his southern accent & dialect) and gets by in three more.

  • Dutch
  • English
  • Spanish
  • Indonesian
  • German, basic
  • French, basic
  • Norwegian, basic

What Jeroen writes about

Fifteen seasons, written down

Find Jeroen

Same person, everywhere.

The easiest way to reach Jeroen about a week at Swell is the enquiry form. For the professional trail, he’s on LinkedIn.



LinkedIn

Enquire about a week

Your next wave

Reading about it is the easy part.

Come and learn where Jeroen built it. Small groups, patient coaches, and a beach break that suits people standing up for the first time.

Explore the surf retreat →

Elsewhere on the web

From our guests

Don’t take our word for it.
Take theirs

4.9 300+ Reviews
Megan S
Age
43
From
San Diego
Level
Beginner
Travelled
Travelled solo
If I could give Swell 10 stars I would!! My partner and I visited Swell at the end of March 2026. We had an absolutely amazing trip. The rooms are clean and spaceship. The A/C works great and had warm water to shower. The WiFi is spotty in the upstairs rooms but works perfectly in the downstairs communal room. The staff is above & beyond!! The meals were some of the best I’ve had. The surf instructors are phenomenal.. they work with your experience and levels of surfing and join you for breakfast & dinner nights. The yoga is great mostly long holds and stretches which are great after 2 sessions of surfing. Haudy is the best. She runs the place and without her Swell wouldn’t be Swell. I highly recommend doing the canyon tour with Helmut. And last but not least the people that I stayed there with honestly became my family for the week. I honestly want to come back!
Tripadvisor April 2026
Aerial view of the cove at Swell, Cabarete
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