My suitcase suggests this is not your typical Maldives holiday. Instead of Orlebar Brown shorts and floaty Brunello Cucinelli linens, it contains a pair of Adidas Predator Pro-Hybrid junior goalkeeping gloves. The beautiful game isn’t normally associated with azure seas and rustling palms, but this trip is different. Alongside surfing, fishing and extraordinary marine encounters, the regular staff-guest football match promises to be a highlight of our Indian Ocean break.

My son Felix and I usually head to mountainous north Wales but this year, with his big brother on rugby tour, we’re after something a little more exotic. Split between Four Seasons’ dreamy Maldives resorts, it’s both father-son bonding trip and peachy two-centre holiday.

Within minutes of arriving at Kuda Huraa, we’re snorkelling alongside stingrays and blizzards of tropical fish. Just yards away, our beachfront villa has high white wood ceilings, beams and breezy coastal décor: Cape Cod meets the tropics. A chic “hanging circle” swing chair offers hypnotic views of the emerald lagoon.

Deeper relaxation awaits at the private island spa. Reached by a traditional dhoni, it offers guests the works, from hi-tech scans and sound healing to rooftop rituals under the stars. But what 10-year-old is interested in his old man’s non-surgical facelift? Surfing’s far more enticing and Kuda Huraa happens to be the world’s most luxurious surf retreat. Local waves include the renowned Sultans’ overhead barrels and reef breaks for all abilities including, much to fast-food fan Felix’s delight, Chicken Nuggets (a wave for beginners).

‘Surfing’s awesome for bonding,’ says our positive, patient instructor Angelica Schon, a former South African longboard champion, who still catches Eastern Cape breaks with her father. ‘You’ll watch your son on a wave. He’ll watch you. You’re stoked for each other.’ Felix and I have a little less synchronicity, I fear. We’re both rookies, but while he’s a springy nipper, I’ve a fair few more miles on the clock, and stiff hips. He goes up. I go down. Repeatedly.

We return the next morning, heading to a nearby break. But as we paddle out, the weather turns. Raging monsoon wind and horizontal rain arrive at astounding speed. Time for plan B: surfing the storm’s choppy lagoon swell. It’s a wild, visceral experience: palm trees bent like archers’ bows, fronds blasted into horizontal windsocks. You’ll quickly forget blue skies. Not this. But it does generate serious appetites. Kuda Huraa has stellar dining options, from Baraabaru’s contemporary Indian to Kandu Grill’s divine meat and fish.

The weather continues to stymie our plans. Snorkelling with turtles is abandoned. Dolphin watching delayed. We finally embark under Cecil B DeMille skies with atomic rain clouds cut by a single, laser-like sunbeam that spotlights 60 or 70 spinner dolphins as they somersault and backflip around our boat. Nature at its most dramatic.

And relentless. The monsoon harries us to Four Seasons’ second home: Landaa Giraavaru. My Lord, it’s beautiful. No downpour can dull the lustre of the island, whose guests cycle around the verdant interior with 8,000 orchids and a magnificent kitchen garden.

Our vast overwater villa, with 30sqm pool, overlooks Landaa Giraavaru’s crowning glory: a dazzlingly white, half mile-long, sand-bar beach. Our kayak slaps across the wind-whipped sea to its pristine tip, escorted by stingrays, turtles and dive-bombing white terns.

Like any north Wales regular, we’re veterans in squeezing joy from challenging conditions. The guest-staff football match, played before a colourful crowd including scarlet macaws, white cockatoos and yellow parakeets – as staff pets, they squawk for the home team – is a total blast.

As more adventures, including fishing – I’d dreamed of us high-fiving over plump snapper – are abandoned, smaller moments stand out: watching reef sharks cruising past the sea bar; swimming from the villa steps under a purple and crimson sunset; cycling home in biblical rain from Al Barakat restaurant’s Eastern Mediterranean feast, soaked to the skin, laughing with King Lear’s wild-eyed glee.

And it allows plenty of time with the Marine Discovery Centre’s experts. After attaching small branch corals to frames to help re-establish Landaa Giraavaru’s reef, devastated by bleaching in 2024, we head to Turtle Rehab to witness the damage from discarded fishing nets. One turtle, missing both front flippers, is christened Frisbee – marine biologists clearly maintain a dark sense of humour when saving the planet.

Even better, our most anticipated ocean adventure still awaits. Nearby Hanifaru Bay, a marine-protected area inside Baa Atoll’s Unesco-listed biosphere, is the best place on Earth to swim with reef manta rays. The amazing fish with 11ft wingspans, weighing up to 1500lbs, gather en masse to gorge on plankton, driven towards the atoll by the southwest monsoon. We’re here on a “manta hot date” when currents, generated by the full and new moon, trap huge quantities of plankton inside the bay.

The Four Seasons’ Manta-On-Call programme whisks guests off by speedboat when mantas are spotted

‘It’s like a ballet,’ says Sophie Owsianka, Baa Atoll project manager for the Maldives Manta Conservation Programme. ‘Mantas can be so elegant, so graceful. But when they’re mass-feeding, they enter a trance-like state, bumping into each other. Sometimes they’re stacked, layer-upon-layer, swimming in a cyclone around the plankton. It’s compelling to witness.’

Felix will surely remember this for the rest of his life. So, I enlist in Four Seasons’ Manta-On-Call programme. On arrival, I receive a mobile phone in waterproof case. If mantas are spotted, we’re immediately alerted and whisked to Hanifaru Bay by speedboat.

The phone never leaves our side. On the beach. In the kayak. Over lunch and supper. But it never rings. As days pass, I become more anxious. On the football pitch, in the villa’s glass-floored overwater bathroom, during Café Landaa breakfast: complete silence. Oh, the irony. Those muscular monsoon winds delivering plankton are also sabotaging our manta meeting.

Until. Finally. On the last lunchtime, the mobile chirps. The wind has dropped, the mantas are here, the boat leaving. Unfortunately, in less than three hours, so is the Four Seasons’ seaplane to the international airport. We can’t make it. Having travelled 5,300 miles across five time zones, we’ve missed the mantas by minutes.

Still, who’s complaining? Llandudno might have better weather, but this is the mesmerising Maldives – the ultimate destination for son, surf and soccer.

Kuda Huraa garden pavilions from around £760 per night, Landaa Giraavaru oceanfront bungalows from around £1,670 per night. Four Seasons Maldives Summer Camp, 20 July to 31 August, includes complimentary football, surfing and marine conservation with celebrity experts; fourseasons.com/maldives