July 2016 (ROTM#91) Tallows Beach, NSW Australia

I’m all about educating people how to spot rips and I realise that an aerial shot from straight above is probably not all that useful – unless you are in a hang glider, but I couldn’t ignore this picture. Nearmap is similar to Google Earth, but seems to have access to higher quality images and the details are incredible. I was taking a virtual trip up the NSW Coast on Nearmap and went to one of my favourite places: Byron Bay. If you visit  the Lighthouse at Byron and look south, you’ll see a beautiful expanse of beach called Tallows Beach. It’s a typical NSW beach with decent waves and rips about every 200 m along. This image is quite amazing. It shows a rip current channel running along the beach from the bottom of the image at a strong angle before widening and turning straight offshore. It really is ‘rip current geomorphology 101’.

 Most rips sit in channels that are quite narrow and you can gauge the size of this rip channel by the people on the beach. Most rips run at different angles and this one is no exception as it carves a channel through the sandbar and ends up curling around at the end. You can see the puffs of transported sand by the rip as well as a curved ‘rip head bar’ where most of this sediment eventually deposits. The strength of the rip current flow is evident from what we call ‘megaripples’ which sit in the rip channel. Strong currents always shape the sand to form these large bedforms. You can clearly see a ‘dark gap’ between the waves breaking on the adjacent sandbanks, but importantly you can also see that waves still do break in rips. It’s not always a clear dark gap!

 The danger of this rip should be obvious. You can start off literally at the shoreline and find yourself floating gradually offshore if you lose your footing. It probably wouldn’t seem like a big deal, but once you start heading offshore, the channel is much deeper and before you know it you are out the back. In this case floating would take you out the back and the curved nature indicates that you may soon be brought back on the shallow sand back. Swimming parallel clearly works too, but only if you do this in the part of the channel that is heading straight offshore and by then you probably won’t make it before ending up out the back. If you start swimming parallel early on, when the channel is angled, if you swim towards the top of the image, you’d be out in a flash. If you chose to swim towards the bottom, you might make it, but you’d be swimming against the current.

 So while this is an aerial shot of a rip that you likely won’t see yourself, there is plenty of educational aspects to it.

Check out the bedforms in the rip channel