Do you dream of travelling to palm-lined places where you can get your work done around soul-filling surf sessions?

I’ve done it. My partner and I spent the last year travelling the world, working remotely, and surfing. And I can confirm it is everything you’re dreaming of: we surfed every day – sometimes three times a day, we ate delicious food, drank wine, did some hiking and watched the sunset on the beach every night and we both became way better surfers.

But, as every digital nomad knows, it takes time and lots of research to set up an ideal working and living situation. You have to ensure there will be solid internet, a good place to work and a comfortable place to live when you get there, and hopefully, you’ll find people you’ll want to hang out with.

Throw in the added challenge of finding a place with consistent waves that suit your skill level and you’ve really complicated your location checklist. This is why we founded Unleash Surf in Peru – to make it easy for remote-working surfers to live the ideal lifestyle – without dealing with all the logistics of setting it up for themselves.

If you’re trying to figure out how to do it for yourself, here are our 7 steps to setting up your remote working and surfing lifestyle:

Scour the spot guide of magicseaweed.com or surfline.com to figure out the wave set-ups and challenge level of the breaks where you plan to go.

Review the seasonal data on each of those sites to find out swell consistency and swell size at the time of year you’d likely be there.

Some of the best places to surf every day don’t have great internet and it is stressful to discover that mid-skype call with a client. Before you go, determine minimum internet speeds for your work by keeping track of your daily bandwidth usage and then check out websites like Nomadlist or Speedtest.net to look for places that meet your requirements.

We always buy a prepaid data roaming package for mobile in case the internet has a bad day. This can get expensive in some countries so it may be worth paying the daily rates of a global data roaming SIM card.

You could also consider using a mobile wifi router like this one here, which works in over 110 countries around the world.

If you’re a first-time digital nomad, you will have enough to get used without the hassle of big time-differences when working with clients.

Minimize this stress by limiting your search to locations that are within 1-2 hours of your home time zone.

When you’ve narrowed down your search to places that meet your waves and wifi needs you’ll want to figure out some of the finer make-or-break details such as:

• Are the waves overwhelmed by supa-fast Brazilians?
• Is there decent coffee there?
• Is the town walkable?

Sometimes you can find what you want on Google, but you’ll get the best info by posting your questions on wannasurf.com or reddit.com/surf.

Although there are a few surf-destinations with good coworking spaces, they are few and far between. So you may have to figure out how to work from your apartment, hotel, local library or coffee shop.

Check out Copass, Workfrom, Sharedesk or Woala to see if there are spaces that would work for you in your desired destinations. My partner and I usually rent a 2-bedroom and turn one room into our office.

If a laptop and a place to rest your head is all you need, finding an ideal place to spend a few months will be a matter of picking a good hotel or surf hostel. If you want a private apartment in a safe neighbourhood and in walking distance to the surf, you’ll need to do a bit more homework.

Most surf-towns have longer-term vacation rental options that you can find on sites like Airbnb, but often the best and most affordable places are only advertised on cafe noticeboards or local Facebook groups. When you find some options, check a map to see if an apartment you’ve found online is in the area you like.

But really the best way best way to find a great pad is to show up, stay in a hotel or Airbnb for the first week and look for rental places in person – some of the best places put little more than a sign up in their window.

Unleash has series of tips for digital nomads on how to find an ideal surf-side apartment.

The biggest barrier to making the leap to a remote-working and surfing lifestyle is probably your own narrative about why you can’t. If you think you will regret not doing it at this time in your life, then you probably should.

We’ve set up Unleash Surf so that making the jump is stress-free as we take care of everything! You’ll be guaranteed surf, excellent wifi, a private apartment, weekend adventures and an amazing group of professionals to hang out while you surf your face off.

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