Gold Coast

Technically this is New South Wales: the border runs across Point Danger, and the Queensland pros walk past the monument to warm up here. D-Bah is the pressure valve of the whole coast, a compact beachbreak squeezed between the Tweed River training walls and the point that swallows every swell going and serves it back as punchy A-frame wedges. Rights bounce off the river wall, lefts run toward the rocks, and the banks reshuffle after every river flood. The standard is high for a beachbreak, because everyone who cannot get a wave at Snapper paddles out here. It shuts down on the wrong bank and flogs the unfit, but you will catch more waves in an hour at D-Bah than in a day on the Superbank.

Start with the story: in 2001 a pumping station began moving sand across the Tweed River mouth to keep it open, and the surplus accidentally built the Superbank, a single bar that on its day carries a wave from behind Snapper Rocks through Rainbow Bay and Greenmount all the way to Kirra, close to two kilometers of it. Nothing else in surfing links this long over sand. The wave at the top is fast, pocketed and shockingly perfect, which is why the world tour has opened seasons here and why Mick Fanning, Joel Parkinson and Stephanie Gilmore all grew up within walking distance. Now the honesty: this is the most crowded lineup on Earth, several hundred surfers on a good swell, and the standard behind the rock is world tour level. Do not paddle to the top expecting charity. Sit halfway down the point, take the reforms and leftovers, and you will still ride the best sand-bottom wave of your life.

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One headland in from Snapper, the same sand wearing its Sunday manners. Rainbow Bay is the sheltered corner of the Superbank where the wave slows down, stands up politely and rolls through in long, forgiving walls. This is where Coolangatta learns to surf: kids on foamies, grandparents on logs, surf schools working the inside, and a grass bank at Pat Fagan Park where half the suburb watches the other half. On small swells it is the friendliest point wave imaginable; when the Superbank lights up, the pros come flying through mid-face and the beginners wisely give way. Warm water, an easy paddle from the beach, coffee thirty steps from the sand. If the Gold Coast has a front porch, this is it.

The middle act of the Superbank, and the wave with the best manners of the three. Whatever comes screaming past Snapper has calmed down by the time it wraps around Greenmount hill: still long, still peeling, but with room to breathe and time to set up your line. At two to three feet this is longboard and midlength heaven, a wave you can walk on. On the handful of days each year when the whole bank connects, you can take off here and, with luck and lungs, ride through to Kirra. The headland path above gives you the best free grandstand in Australian surfing, Norfolk pines and all. Crowded, of course, but gentler in spirit than the top of the point.

For most of the year Kirra dozes, a pretty little runner beside its groyne while the Superbank hoards the sand. Then a cyclone parks in the Coral Sea and the most famous barrel in Australia wakes up. Kirra at its best is a conveyor of round, spitting tubes over sand, so fast and so hollow that the old guard still measures every other wave against it: this is where Michael Peterson ruled the seventies and where the town's surf clubs raised generations of world champions. When it breaks properly, everyone within five hundred kilometers knows by lunchtime, and the takeoff is a commitment you make with your whole body. There is no easy version: you are either riding the barrel or you are inside it wrong. Come to watch on the big days, surf the leftovers after, and you will understand why grown surfers go quiet when someone says the word Kirra.

The Alley is where the Gold Coast sends you for your first wave, and where half the coast retires to when it wants an easy one. A long, slow right rolls off the mouth of Currumbin Creek past Elephant Rock, at a pace built for logs, midlengths and first bottom turns. Mornings are a parade: schools, grandmothers, groms, SUPs, everyone sharing warm rolling walls that forgive nearly everything. The one thing to respect is the creek itself: on a draining tide the current through the channel is a river, so paddle at the point, not the mouth. On a serious cyclone swell the Alley grows up fast and becomes a real point wave with lines to the horizon; the longboards watch that one from the carpark.

Everyone calls it Palmy, and nobody puts it on a postcard, which is exactly why the locals love it. Palm Beach is the working suburb between Currumbin and Burleigh, and its string of rock jetties, Nineteenth Avenue, Twenty First, stacks sand into wedgy peaks that punch far above their size. On a northeast windswell the bounce off the Twenty First jetty is the best bank on this stretch, a ramp section shortboarders drive across town for. The crew is tight and has been surfing together since primary school, so wait your turn and earn your smile. No headland, no viewing hill, no drama: just a surf club, a pie shop and peaks that keep producing. It is the most honest surf on the Gold Coast.

The prettiest act of theater in Australian surfing: a national park headland, a hill of Norfolk pines full of spectators, and a right that bends around the rocks and barrels down the Cove over hard-packed sand. Burleigh is where professional surfing grew up: the 1977 Stubbies contest, held right here, invented the man-on-man format the sport still uses. At head high it is a fast, makeable dream; at six foot and beyond it becomes a genuinely serious wave, with a boiling takeoff behind the rocks and a crew that includes every good surfer in the region. If the point is beyond you, the beachbreak peaks toward North Burleigh run mellower. Watching from the hill with fish and chips counts as culture here, and on the big days it is the best seat in the country.

Drive north until the towers stop: The Spit is the last unbuilt kilometer of the strip, a ribbon of dunes between the Pacific and the Broadwater where the Gold Coast finally exhales. The banks along the sand pumping jetty and the Seaway wall are the draw, shifty peaks with actual space between surfers, a sentence you cannot write about anywhere else on this coast. Dawn here is dog walkers, fishermen and glassy A-frames with the skyline of Surfers Paradise glowing pink behind you. Across the Seaway lies South Stradbroke Island, the wedging left the boat-and-jetski crew guards like a secret. Nothing at The Spit is world class and nothing is crowded, which some mornings is exactly the trade you want.