January 2025 (ROTM#193) Coalcliff Beach, NSW Australia

Rip current? Believe it….or not!

Is there a rip current in this picture?  It sure looks like there is. After all, I’ve been preaching ‘white is nice, green is mean’ and to look for dark gaps between the whitewater as the best way to spot rips. And that’s all true! But here’s the problem – not all dark gaps are rips. And here’s another problem – pictures are not necessarily the best way to educate people how to spot rips.

 This picture shows a classic ‘dark gap’ rip current between breaking waves. But it wasn’t a rip current at all. There was no rip at the beach and I just waited until I saw some random wave breaking that made conditions look like a rip. While this isn’t a problem for using pictures to educate people about what rips look like, for example I could have said here’s a nice rip and most people would have believed it and learned from it, but it is a problem for people who are actually at the beach and seeing these random dark gaps pop up consistently. That’s why you need to spend several minutes watching the surf and if you see repeated dark gaps occurring in the same location, it’s probably because there’s a rip current occupying a deeper channel.

 My UNSW Beach Safety Research Group is working at the moment on a project to see what the best approach is to teach people how to identify rip currents – is it through pictures, videos, being at the beach or something else? Stay tuned for updates and if you’d like to help out please contact us at https://www.beachsafetyresearch.com/contact-us