A few hundred metres down the street from Jarvis Earle’s family home in fashionable Oak Park, Sydney is a wave known as Sandshoes or just plain ‘Shoes.
The short, right-hand reef is home to a crew of devotees, who relish the punchy bowls tossed up by their rocky cove. Jarvis also likes to ride ‘Shoes, albeit with a slightly different approach. While the pack jostles for the right, Jarvis has made the even shorter left his own. For most, the left is too marginal, but for a surfer blessed with the gifts of instant acceleration, glue-foot board control and spring-loaded quads it becomes a kind of private playground. “He’s the only one who really surfs it properly,” offers Peter Balmer, a local photographer who has been capturing Jarvis’s trajectory for the last five years. “Like big turns and airs,” continues Pete enthusiastically.
Although fond of his little left at the end of the street, 19-year-old Jarvis has spent most of his youth roaming the vast expanse of beach around the corner where Cronulla stretches to Wanda, Elouera and Green Hills before folding into a cluster of fabled reefs. An area where Sydney suburbia collides with coastline, shop-fronts spill towards sloping dunes, concrete walls frame off-shore rock shelfs, and housing estates buttress beachside scrubland. Home to the same panoply of waves that shaped the likes of Jim Banks, Mark Occhilupo, Richard Marsh, Glen Pringle, Andy King, Kurt Flintoff and Connor O’Leary. Cronulla’s eclectic surfing community also helped mould Jarvis into the kid who became World Junior Champion in 2022.
When I catch up with Jarvis his hair is still chlorine-stained after a weekend QS win in Melbourne’s URBNSurf wave pool. Despite the lingering high of a recent victory there is also a little part of Jarvis that feels like he missed out. While he was
