December 2016 (ROTM#96) Bondi Beach, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Love it or hate it, iconic Bondi Beach is still Australia's most popular beach. It's hard to believe that this 900 m long beach can pack in 40,000 people, but it can (apparently).  Generally there's two sets of red and yellow flags patrolled by lifeguards, one at the northern end of the beach where the waves tend to be more gentle, and one towards the middle of the beach. Unfortunately there's never any flags at the south end of the beach, which is where many people end up as the local 380 bus drops them off pretty at  this vantage point. 

 So where would you swim at the south end of the beach (bottom of this picture)? Well, the water looks pretty inviting until you realise that it's a very dangerous 'U' shaped rip formation with one rip flowing offshore against the rocks and one about 50 m up the beach flowing out between the two sand bars. Basically if you jumped in that lovely green water along the beach, you'd soon end up in one of those rips. So it's probably a good idea to make that longish walk up the beach to swim between the flags where the lifeguards are.

 Thanks to Professor Bernie Bauer from the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) for giving me this picture he took while visiting a few years ago. Bernie is a Canadian coastal geomorphologist (amongst other talents) and actually taught (and inspired) me when I was an undergrad at the University of Toronto (Scarborough). 

Bondi showing off a ‘Horseshoe’ rip