October 2009 (ROTM #10) Monterey, California, USA

Well, it's not exactly Monterey. The Monterey Peninsula is basically one big long sandy beach extending north from Monterey to Santa Cruz and there's rips the whole way. In fact, it looks an awful lot like Australia.

 This picture was taken on the beach between the towns of Seaside and Marina by Dr. Jamie MacMahan of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. I've been working on rip stuff with Jamie for the last month and he's probably the guru when it comes to measuring rips, not only here, but around the world. He's particularly adept at capturing measurements that no-one else is capable of and his latest breakthrough is throwing fleets of GPS drifters in rips and tracking where they go. His results are pretty significant and show that about 90% of the time, the drifters (and people) will flow around in a big circle without leaving the surf zone and often end up back in shallow water. The message here is that sometimes it pays to just go with the flow when you're stuck in a rip.

 You can read more about Jamie's research here.

Looking down from a sea cliff onto a rather large rip