November 2024 (ROTM#191) Woonona Beach, NSW Australia

Look for the shoreline embayment and there shall a rip current be.

Woonona Beach is a lovely beach just north of Wollongong, NSW that stretches for about 2 kilometers and changes its name to Bellambi Beach at the southern end of the beach. It’s one of my favourite beaches to swim at to be honest. It’s just the classic Aussie beach to me – which means it has good bodysurfing waves! But with waves comes rip currents.

 I took this picture towards the end of April and the water temperature was glorious. It’s funny how people just assume that swimming is done once summer is over – it’s not! I had the beach to myself and a few seagulls – and a lot of rip currents. In coastal geomorphology terms, the beach was exhibiting classic ‘transverse bar and rip’ morphology where rip current channels exist along the beach separated by sand bars connected to the beach. You can see one of the channel rips in the middle of this picture – the dark green gap of water snuggled between the shallow sand bars. If you look closely you can see a series of these ‘dark green gap’ rips all the way down the beach.

These rips have been in the same places for weeks. How do I know that? They have all eroded out embayments along the shoreline – another visual clue to help you spot rips.

 Another interesting thing about these rips is that they weren’t that dangerous. It was an extremely low tide and you could easily stand up in the rip channel itself. With a bit more depth though, they would have started to flow much stronger. Rips always flow stronger about 1-2 hours either side of low tide.