The Great Autumn, Part Two: Gold Coast Prelude In the week leading up to NSW’s bomb Saturday, coasts further north were surreal. Sharkies, Tuesday morning. Link copied to clipboard It probably shouldn’t have been this good. But it was. “At the start of the week I wasn’t thinking it was going to be insane,” says Andrew Shield. “But the way it went, the conditions and the sand everywhere were so good.” Shieldsy’s been surfing and shooting the southern Queensland and northern NSW coasts pretty much forever. He has a finely tuned eye for wind and wave. On Tuesday last week, he checked Burleigh Cove, looked beyond it to the sandy zone just off Burleigh headland known as Sharkies, and realised something interesting was happening.