April 2024 (ROTM#184) Coalcliff Beach, NSW Australia

Autumn is my favourite season - no crowds! But plenty of rips.

It’s been the summer (and now autumn) of sand on the east coast of New South Wales this year as El Nino conditions have resulted in fairly small and consistent swell waves which are a perfect formula for promoting onshore transport of sand. We had a few large swell events that re-arranged some of that sand offshore, but for the last few months it’s come back with a vengeance.

Coalcliff is my local beach and some of the long-term locals have told me they haven’t seen this much sand in 50 years, which is remarkable. But as sand comes back to the beach quickly, rip current channels often form as well. The channelised rip current in this picture is the thin green line heading offshore about two-thirds of the way down the beach. You can actually see the large sand bar along the beach separated by the shoreline by a deep green trough. Much of the water in the waves breaking across the bar ends up in that trough and starts flowing along the beach into the rip current, which is why we often call that trough a feeder current.

Beyond that first rip current is another dark gap heading offshore which is another rip current that is also channelised, but is squeezed between a sand bar and a rock reef, so it’s what we refer to as a boundary rip.

 I took this picture about a week ago (it’s April 1 today!) and since then the waves have remained small and both the feeder channel and the rip current are starting to fill in with sand. If these conditions continue, both the channels will eventually fill up and the rips will disappear until the next big well comes along to strip sand back offshore and begin the cycle again.