About us
About us
Airzone Kitesurf School was established in 2002 by Berny and Zoe Maginn. We still run the school together and are just as passionate about the sport as ever. We teach in the UK and New Zealand for summer all year round. Our teaching location in the UK is at Meon Shore, Hill Head, between Portsmouth and Southampton in Hampshire on the south coast of the UK, and just over an hour from London. We started at the very beginning of the sport – see the picture below taken in 1999. We now live the dream, doing something we love and introducing it to others, many of whom have changed their lives too, all because of kitesurfing!
Zoe and Berny in 1999
after Zoe’s first ever ride upwind
using the 2-line Wipika Classic
Teaching around the world
We run our kitesurf school in the New Zealand from November to May and spend the NZ winter running our UK kitesurf school for the rest of the year. Berny qualified as an IKO Examiner in 2004, and we now run IKO kitesurf instructor courses throughout the seasons in NZ and the UK, helping others to change their lifestyles and live their dreams too.
We still love teaching beginners to learn to kitesurf and seeing how much fun people have. Progression is very fast with this sport and the fantastic equipment we have nowadays, so it’s always exciting for us to watch people turn into true kite surfers as a result of our teaching and fcoaching.
Focussed on providing the best instruction
Airzone is not a huge school. We could have chosen to go that way. But we are kitesurf instructors for a reason. We love teaching and we love the lifestyle. So instead of becoming managers of a great big school with staff who come and go and masses of students whose names we never remember, we choose to focus better on fewer students. And kitesurfing is all we do. We don’t have other jobs that we fit it around, kitesurfing really is our passion in life.
In this way, we know all our students benefit from the experience and expertise that over 20 years of teaching at the forefront of kitesurf instruction has given us. We will take you forward at your own pace, not hold you back or push you too quickly. Each lesson is focused on you achieving the best you can and enjoying the experience. You are here to have fun, as well as become a kitesurfer.
Our credentials
We are an International Kiteboarding Organisation (IKO) school. This means we undergo regular inspections, have procedures and documentation in place that is checked and monitored, and we achieve best practice in our training and safety standards. As instructors are IKO and BKSA qualified, and our qualifications and affiliations are kept up to date. Zoe is an IKO Level 2 instructor and Berny is an IKO Examiner, at the top level of training in kitesurfing and one of only 30 in the world. We have both been involved in developing teaching techniques and materials within the top level IKO team.