If you ever wanted a 'rip spotting tower', the Q1 Tower at Surfers Paradise in Queensland is your best bet for a birds eye view.

The south coast of NSW is a stunning coastline with many beautiful surf beaches, but be careful if you visit - many of those beaches are not patrolled by lifeguards.

So if you can't get your head around spotting rips in the surf zone, look along the shoreline, and if you see isolated embayments like this, there's a good chance it's a rip!

Pictures of rips are great educational tools and certainly better than diagrams, but nothing beats the real thing.

I took this during one of my community 'Science of the Surf' talks several years ago and it clearly shows the trajectory of the rip, and how complex that trajectory can be.

Subtle. Rip currents can be very subtle, but they do give us many different kinds of visual clues on how to spot them.

Rips aren’t all bad. The fact that they circulate water means that they can disperse and diffuse the concentration of pollutants reasonably quickly. If it wasn’t for rips, a lot of these pollutants would hang around for weeks.

When you think of famous big wave spots, Ireland doesn't immediately come to mind, but near the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare, the right conditions can form the 'perfect wave' called Aileens that can reach up to 12 m high.

Who says there’s no rips in the Med? I was very pleased to have this photo sent to me by Enzo Pranzini of some rip currents along the Cilento Coast in Southern Italy, which is on the western side of Italy, just south of Salerno.