The first surf spot I ever dedicated myself to was a pointbreak that wasn’t.

The wave at Cronulla Point breaks off a headland, but it’s not a pointbreak. It’s a bedrock reef in geological terms, a one-section wonder in surfer’s terms, and a slab when it’s low tide and six foot from the south.

No-one grows up at Cronulla Point with the fluid pointbreak style of, say, Joel Parkinson, whose movements are unhurried and take into account not just the next section but the next hundred metres. Instead, Cronulla Point surfers have the nuts-and-bolts necessary to maximise a wave that’s fifty metres long, at best, and often much less.

If there’s a motto for surfing Cronulla Point it’s ‘get down it, get under it, and get it done.’ Same goes with most of the reefbreaks around Cronulla. They’re short, they’re sharp, and they’re intense.

I haven’t lived at Cronulla for a while but memories of those formative years came back while watching the Margaret River Pro shift over to the Box on Wednesday. Surfers on both sides of the screen had trouble making sense of what was happening.

It was clear which contestants had been brought up around slabs, and same goes with the viewers of the webcast. Some were bewildered by the spectacle, said it was boring and the wave was too short, while others appreciated the finer detail of making a drop that’s a 50/50 proposition at best, stalling while still falling, then shifting weight from one rail to the other while the water draws hard off the bottom. And it’s all over in five seconds.

Maximising those five or so seconds was what we considered great surfing. Not that I was particularly good at it. I was Jake Marshall to a suburb of Barron Mamiya’s: Popout Manion, Grub Coulter, Ox and Speg, Harey, Rusty, Boogs and Corey, Sparky, Griggsy, Kingy, Terepai and a hundred other surfers who saw things that I didn’t, and who packed hours of intensity into seconds of tube time.

We’re all products of our environment and just as surfers raised in south-east QLD will lean towards a loping pointbreak style, and young beachbreak specialists towards technical airs, a slab template develops for those raised near top-heavy waves. 

These days I live near another pointbreak; this one a legitimately long pointbreak wave. For the first five years I ruined innumerable waves because I approached it slab-style: Tried to get under the hood immediately after takeoff, forcing the action rather than letting the wave naturally unfold, which is the classic pointbreak way.

Old habits die hard, but they also helped me appreciate just what went down at the Box on Wednesday.

- Stu