Gold Coast Pro
May 3rd - 13th, 2025

This Saturday we’ll see the Gold Coast Pro return to Snapper Rocks...I mean Burleigh Heads.

With the WSL's return to Snapper Rocks announced and anticipated, Tropical Cyclone Alfred threw a spanner in the works, rearranging the perfect right pointbreak into a fragmented mess of a wave. A huge sand slug was dumped north of the point, creating a very poor right hander and slightly better left, while Snapper itself was stripped of sand, better for fishing than surfing.

The misshapen sand is slowly sorting itself out, however the WSL took early action knowing it wouldn't be ready in time. Thus the decision was made to move the event to Burleigh Heads and the quality of the bank there isn’t too shabby at all.

Burleigh sparkling (WSL)

So what’s in store for the coming event window?

Plenty of easterly trade-swell - possibly even too much at times - with multiple opportunities to run the event.

The source of the easterly swell will be a strong high pressure system filling out into the Tasman Sea later this week and into the weekend as a couple of low pressure troughs squeeze its north-eastern flank.

An initial surge of strong south-east winds through the Tasman Sea on Thursday and Friday should generate a good pulse of 3 foot mid-period south-east swell for Saturday, the opening day of the waiting period. Conditions will be clean through the early-to-mid morning with a gusty S/SW breeze, deteriorating from later morning as winds shift more south-east and strengthens. 

Sand aside, the mid-morning wind switch will be the biggest difference between Snapper and Burleigh, with Snapper through to Rainbow better angled to handle a south-east wind than Burleigh with its more exposed headland.

As the weekend progresses, the strong high is due to continue moving slowly east, while tropical instability to the north will squeeze pressure gradients, setting up a broad, elongated fetch of easterly trade-winds that will slowly retract to the east along with the movement of the high.

This is a great setup to provide consistent, moderate levels of easterly trade-swell to the Queensland coast, with initially weak, low period energy on Sunday, again in the 3 foot range, expected to slowly strengthen and increase in size through next week.

At this stage we should see the trade-swell reaching 4-5 feet through early-mid next week and persisting at this size for the entire event window, though there’s the possibility for further intensifications which would boost the swell into the large size range. We'll keep a close eye on those developments so check back in.

As the high and easterly trade-fetch slowly retract to the east, local winds will back off in strength and become more favourable, though still following the general pattern of morning south-southwesterlies ahead of fresh afternoon south-easterlies.

The main question is, will the organisers get a quick start and run in smaller cross-shore surf this weekend, or focus on the better quality easterly trade-swell next week onwards? We're tipping more towards the latter than the former.

We’ll provide running updates on any upgrades in next week’s swell in the commentary below.

16-Day Gold Coast Forecast Graph
16-Day Gold Coast WAMs