June 2013 (ROTM#54) Rockingham, Western Australia

A few weeks ago I was at the Australian Professional Ocean Lifeguard Association (APOLA) conference at Bondi  and one of the lifeguards from the Gold Coast City Council (Brett Paull) asked me to have a look at some pictures a paraglider friend of his (Scott Patman) had taken near Rockingham, which is south of Perth on Australia's west coast. This was one of them. It looks like some sort of rip current vortex and whirlpool of doom! It's an amazing picture...so amazing that The Huffington Post did an article on it and it went viral!

So what is going on and is it dangerous? Well, what you see are clouds of suspended sand in the water. What you can't see is that the waves were approaching at a strong angle to the beach. This creates a strong alongshore current. At the same time there were big mega-cusps in the beach and the waves breaking on the beach rush up these cusps and then back down as backwash. The combination of water running back out of these cusps and the longshore current causes offshore directed eddies to spin out about 100 m from the shoreline. This carries the fine sand stirred up by the breaking waves and backwash. It looks nasty....but it's really not that dangerous. The water flow is slow and you could probably swim across it no problem, but it's another example of how incredible nature is!

What I worry about is that pictures like this get picked up by the media and all of a sudden everyone starts thinking this is what rips look like...well they don't. This is a very unusual type of rip for sure. There's a YouTube video on these rips as well and there's shots of the beach that show the cusps and give you some more perspective.

Whirpool of doom?