April 2010 (ROTM#16) Palm Beach, Sydney, Australia

This picture was taken in April 1994 during my PhD fieldwork at Sydney's most northernmost beach...Palm Beach. it's sometimes known as 'Summer Bay' for fans of the Australian soap 'Home and Away'. Hopefully you can spot the rip. It was a classic, with two longshore feeder channels along the beach meeting together to form a narrow rip neck channel that headed offshore.....and kept on going! You can see from the purple dye that the rip started along the beach and went almost 200 meters offshore. And it only took about 2 minutes from start to finish.

 The weird thing was that the waves were small and most of the day, the rip had been going out just to the breaking waves where the water was brought back to shore across the bar in a wide circle. What happened here was that a wave set (a group of 5-6 bigger waves) came in, broke, piled extra water up on the beach and created a sudden 'rip pulse' that lasted for about 30 seconds. Rip pulses can double the speed of the rip almost instantaneously and can take swimmers a long way offshore. Once you're out that far, the only thing bringing you back is a long swim. Rips pulse about 20% of the time.....another reason to learn how to spot them and avoid them. My good friend Thomas always likes to point out that he's the one wearing the wet suit in the small crowd of people on the beach!

RIP 94 PhD Fieldwork!