September 2009 (ROTM #9) Park Point, Duluth, Minnesota, USA

Okay, this picture isn't the best quality. It's an old aerial photograph, but you can still see 5 rip channels heading offshore. They are pretty much the same distance apart and you can spot them by the darkness of the deeper channels compared to the lighter, shallower sand bars. You can also see some curved rip head bars formed by the sand that is carried out by the rips and then dumped when the rip slows down.

 So where's the picture taken? Hmmmmm, could be anywhere in Australia, could be along the Florida Panhandle coast or it could be pretty much any ocean beach in the world with rips. The only problem is, it's actually in Duluth, Minnesota!

 It's also not the ocean, it's Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world. The beach is called Park Point (or Minnesota Point) Beach and is part of the longest bayhead mouth bar in the world. Yep, rips can occur in lakes if they are big enough. You only need wave activity and sand bars.

 I recently met with Jesse Schomberg (who provided me with this picture) of the Minnesota SeaGrant Program and Dean Packingham of the National Weather Service and they are running an impressive rip education and awareness program for the beach. Rip drownings don't happen often there, but they are treated very seriously. I found it very different from the attitude in Australia where rip drownings are frequent, but there is almost an acceptance and complacency about them.

 As it turns out, Great Lakes rips are a big problem, particularly in Lake Superior, Lake Michigan and Lake Erie, and other shorelines where there are sandy beaches. They would be a much bigger problem if you could swim longer than just a few months a year!

Those ghostly images along the shoreline are rip channels!