August 2019 (ROTM#128) Park Beach, Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia

This is an amazing photo of some impressive, if not downright scary rip currents! I have to thank Coffs Skydivers who posted a video of one of their tandem skydives on Facebook. I shared it on my 'Dr Rip's Science of the Surf' page and took this screenshot from it. Looks like a beautiful place to do a sky dive as long as they don't land in the rips (which of course they wouldn't!). 

 The waves on this day are pretty big and you can see there's a lot of sand being churned into suspension by the breaking waves all along the beach. This sand is ending up in some rip currents, particularly the one at the southern end of the beach (towards the bottom). It looks like the rip flow is starting off in a deeper channel and then being forced 100 m + offshore past the breaking waves. The strength of the current is evident not only by the distance it's flowing offshore, but by how narrow and contained the rip flow is. If you look even further seaward past the leading edge of the suspended sand you can see some faint remains of sand in suspension. This is likely from a pulse in the rip current flow several minutes earlier. Most rips tend to pulse over short periods (30 s to a minute) where they flow faster and further offshore.

 Not a good day for swimming and fortunately there weren't many people on the beach. Rip current flow can do two things: it can re-circulate or exit the surf zone. This is a classic rip exit.

Skydiver cam. Good thing they didn’t land in that rip.