May 2018 (ROTM#113) Coalcliff Beach, Northern Illawarra, NSW, Australia

Coalcliff Beach is quite a unique beach in the Australian context. Located south of Sydney in a region called the Northern Illawarra, it's a small embayed beach bound by the Illawarra escarpment, a very impressive cliff consisting of a sequence of sandstone rock layers (and a coal seam). It's also a mixed sand and gravel beach, with plenty of pebbles and cobbles exposed from time to time. This is unusual as there really aren't a lot of gravel beaches in Australia and the gravel is likely a lag deposit from the eroding sandstone cliff, but may also be related to the old mining activities that used to occur nearby...but I digress!

 Coalcliff is a steep beach known for its' strong backwash and while it doesn't have channelised rips between sandbanks very often, it does get rips, usually against the southern rock platform. However, when the waves are big, most embayed beaches develop rips and on this day the large waves created a rip flowing pretty much straight offshore. You can see it as the narrow dark gap between the areas of breaking waves and whitewater. Not great for swimmers (who shouldn't be in the water on days like this), but great for surfers as it provides them with a free ride out the back. 

Green path straight out the middle = rip