May 2015 (ROTM#77) Tamarama Beach, Sydney, NSW, Australia

This one is a little bit different. Tamarama is my favourite beach on the planet. Not only am I a member of the Tamarama Surf Life Saving Club, but I used to be the caretaker and lived there for 3 glorious years and this was ‘my’ balcony! Tamarama is also where I gave my first Science of the Surf community beach safety education talks and where my purple dye releases into rip currents gained notoriety.

Well, a few weeks ago, Sydney experienced an incredible rainfall deluge and thanks to my friend Guy Waddell (and fellow Club member!) who took this picture, you can see what happened. Who needs purple dye? The brown stuff is the excess stormwater discharge pouring out of all the stormwater drains on the beach and headlands (you can see a little waterfall on the cliff coming out from one of them). The brown stuff is full of all the flotsam and jetsam swept up in the runoff from the streets and is well, pretty skanky. But it’s heading out in the rip current pretty clearly!

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. Thanks to rips, the water tends to clean itself up in a matter of days.  I hope those boardriders didn’t get caught up in the gunk.

Stormwater gunk. Yes, those are surfers.