By Ben Horvath | Photos and clip  www.southwave.com.au


Sydney is a world-renowned surf city.

It is a pretty consistent wave zone, particularly in the autumn and winter months and just beyond, from say February through to October.

Admittedly, we occasionally surf a lot of slop in often very crowded conditions, but we also tap into a fair dose of quality.

The Sydney coastline can be broken into three main surf regions: the northern beaches from Palmie to Manly, the city or eastern suburbs beaches covering Bondi to Maroubra, and finally the southern beaches comprising Cronulla’s long stretch of beaches and the numerous hollow reef breaks on the southern outskirts of Sydney’s vast metropolitan area.

Generally, the northern beaches provide good waves in east or north-east swells January through June, whilst the southern reef breaks are at their best in late autumn and winter south and south east swells: while the city beaches are fickle, Bondi is best in south swells, while Maroubra and Tamarama are best in NE swells.

Southern Sydney’s ten best waves of 2013-14 were all filmed and photographed on Sydney’s southern reef breaks by Cronulla’s Craig Stroh. Craig only ventures north of Solander, to go to work at Sydney Airport.

Therein lies the difference between  Cronulla and most surf enclaves in Australia. There’s world class slabs all within close proximity to the city, airport and a train line. Local underground charger Jeremy Hrbac said, “Andy King and I were discussing how many reefs we actually have to surf around Cronulla. We concluded that we don’t know of anywhere in Australia that’s got so many reefs within a 10 kilometre radius. From Bundeena to Solander we have a good 15 to 20 quality waves that we hunt down and surf, and that’s not including the beach breaks.”

Most of the top ten waves ridden feature local underground Cronulla and Maroubra based chargers, though high profile sometimes Bondi based top 44 pro Julian Wilson occasionally heads south in search of slabs or sky time when in Sydney.

Written by:
Ben Horvath

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