January 2009 (ROTM #1) Muriwai Beach, New Zealand

Welcome to my new Rip of the Month feature! Let’s see how we go with this, but to start off here’s a picture of one of the biggest rips I’ve ever seen. The West Coast Auckland beaches have some of the largest rips in the world and this picture shows several of them. Muriwai receives typical west coast swell with wave heights of 2.5 m almost everyday. The clear gaps heading off at angles are the rips and these would be classified as fixed rips as they sit in deep channels between sandbars.

 As part of an experiment, we jumped in the rip opposite the creek entrance in the middle of the beach, floated along the beach for about 300 m before being carried about 400 m offshore of speeds of 1.5 m/s!!! This picture was scanned from a 35 mm slide that was blown out of my slide carousel and into a puddle while I was getting out of my car in windy Wellington so apologies for the quality.

A big, big, big rip (the dark gap). Flows very fast and very far out to sea.