April 2023 (ROTM#172) Avoca Beach, NSW, Australia

One of the biggest challenges for teaching people how to spot rip currents is that most pictures (including most of my Rips of the Month) are taken from elevation or from the air (from drones for example) so that what you’re seeing are rip currents as viewed from above. But that’s not what your view is from the beach!

This picture was taken by David Edwards, a colleague of mine in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at UNSW Sydney who I’ve taught courses with for years. He’s an avid surfer and took this great picture from his local beach at Avoca, which is in the Central Coast region north of Sydney. It’s a beautiful busy day and this is taken from one of the paths through the dunes. Can you see the rip current?

If not, what you need to look for is the narrow area of darker water heading offshore between the whitewater where waves are breaking. The waves are breaking on shallow sand bars and the rip channel is flowing offshore between them – it’s a channelised rip current that’s only about 5-10 metres wide. It also looks like there are darker feeder channels flowing along the beach into the rip from both sides.

While it’s harder to spot channelised rips from this perspective, it’s often easier to spot them by looking sideways along the beach – white is nice, green is mean!

There’s a lot of umbrellas set up in front of that rip….can you see