I visited the University of Plymouth in the UK in December and Professor Gerd Masselink, a good friend and one of the world's leading coastal geomorphologists, took me on a day tour of part of the Cornwall coast including Perranporth, Fistral Beach, and Newquay. I was blown away. Even though it was a miserable day, the coastline was stunning. Mind-boggingly so. The variety was amazing and it was some of the most beautiful coastal scenery I've ever seen. And there was surf. I knew there was surf in the UK, but it still seemed bizarre to see so many surf shops in these old Cornish towns, not to mention a ton of surfers catching some clean 2 m + winter swell.

The UK also has a rip problem. Not in the winter, because it's far too cold to swim. It's probably far too cold to swim in the summer as well, but hordes of people do and many of them end up getting stuck in rips where they are rescued by RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institute) lifeguards. These pictures are from Constantine Bay, rated as one of the most dangerous swimming beaches in the UK in terms of rips. The beaches and rips are a lot different because the tides are so large. Tide range along this coast can be up to 6 m or more which means the shoreline shifts pretty rapidly between low and high tide. The rips sit in distinct channels and only really fire up over a short period of time around low to mid-tide when the water depths are just right for wave breaking and water getting in the rip channels. For this reason, there are often "mass rescue" events where a ton of people get in trouble at the same time. Lifeguards are always shifting the red and yellow flags around as well as sheperding swimmers and waders around with the changing conditions.

So where's the picture taken? Hmmmmm, could be anywhere in Australia, could be along the Florida Panhandle coast or it could be pretty much any ocean beach in the world with rips. The only problem is, it's actually in Duluth, Minnesota!

It's also not the ocean, it's Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world. The beach is called Park Point (or Minnesota Point) Beach and is part of the longest bayhead mouth bar in the world. Yep, rips can occur in lakes if they are big enough. You only need wave activity and sand bars. I recently met with Jesse Schomberg (who provided me with this picture) of the Minnesota SeaGrant Program and Dean Packingham of the National Weather Service and they are running an impressive rip education and awareness program for the beach. Rip drownings don't happen often there, but they are treated very seriously. I found it very different from the attitude in Australia where rip drownings are frequent, but there is almost an acceptance and complacency about them.

As it turns out, Great Lakes rips are a big problem, particularly in Lake Superior, Lake Michigan and Lake Erie, and other shorelines where there are sandy beaches. They would be a much bigger problem if you could swim longer than just a few months a year!

It's a good example of a flash rip under high energy conditions. The surf had increased in intensity and flash rips were popping up all over the place. While the rip appeared temporarily as a dark gap between the breaking waves, these rips are very mobile and variable in their appearance. That is why they are particularly dangerous and apparently there were a lot of rescuses along the Florida coast the day this photo was taken.

What is interesting is that this picture could be anywhere...Florida, Australia, South Africa, the Great Lakes, etc. Rips definitely have a lot of characteristics in common no matter where you are.

Dr Leatherman is also organising the first international Rip Current Symposium in Miami in February 2010. This meeting will bring together rip scientists and educators from around the world.

Anyway, the reason why this picture is interesting is that there is a fairly obvious dark area where there's very few breaking waves, a good example of a rip. A recent study by the University of New South Wales and Surf Life Saving Australia incorporated this picture in a questionnaire given to over 400 beachgoers and when they were asked to spot the rip in the picture, 20% said they didn't know what a rip was and about 40% pointed to the wrong place, which means 60% didn't know how to spot the rip! In fact, a lot of people actually pointed at the rip as the safest place to swim!

This was the motivation to focus the research study on trying to figure out the best way to improve people's ability to spot rips and led to the development of the slogan "Don't Get Sucked in by the Rip" which was devised by Julie Hatfield of the UNSW Injury Risk Management Research Centre. I think that is the best educational slogan I've ever heard when it comes to rips as it's preventative in nature. In other words....don't get in a rip in the first place!

Bondi Beach is Australia's most famous beach and is such a national icon, that it was listed on the Australian Natural Heritage list in 2008. It's a great beach and a wacky place in general. Just watch a few episodes of the reality tv show Bondi Rescue and you'll get the general idea. Basically, you either love it or you hate it. Personally, I love it, but usually in the mornings in March and April when the crowds are gone and the water is still warm. It's magic.

However, Bondi can be dangerous. This summer it got a lot of publicity for the shark attack on local surfer Glen Orgias. As horrible as that was, it was the first attack in 80 years and sharks really are not a problem...but they sell newspapers. Much more of a problem is the fact that Bondi usually has about 4-5 rips along the beach, none more famous than the Backpacker's Express at the southern end. It's called this because backpackers (and tourists in general) really have no idea what rips are, jump off the 380 bus, run straight down to the beach, dive into the water and straight into the rip. And off they go. It doesn't help that "Backpackers" is almost ALWAYS THERE. It's a classic example of a permanent headland rip. It's not as funny as it sounds. A huge amount of rescues take place every year in the rip, tourists and Australians alike, and as recently as January, 2007 a doctor from Mongolia, who was about to resume studies at The University of New South Wales, drowned in the rip.

In this picture, the rip appears as a clear, seemingly calm, dark channel between breaking waves on the shallow sand bar and the reef.

On this day, the rip channel was oriented offshore in a sort of S-bend direction. You can also see the existence of large ripples within the rip channel itself. Ripples that size are an indication that water is moving fast. You can also see a rip a few hundred metres down the beach. Again it's a classic dark gap between the breaking waves on the shallow sand bars AND you can also see that the rip has eroded the beach creating a little embayment.
The waves on this day were small, but because the channel was so well formed, the rips were flowing pretty fast. Lifeguards will tell you these are the days that most people get into trouble because it looks safe.

If you want to swim at Bondi and don't want to get rescued in a rip, head north to the sets of beach flags in the middle of the beach and at the northern end. Unless of course, you want to end up on Bondi Rescue.

Newcastle is one of Australia's best kept secrets. It's a 2 hour drive north of Sydney and is the second biggest city in NSW, but unless you actually have a reason to go there, you'll just drive straight by on the Pacific Highway without even getting a glimpse. This is a shame because it has some great coastline and beaches and is a pretty nice place to live as well. Dixon Park is in the middle of an approximately 2 km long beach that is called Merewether at it's southern end.

Home and home break of one of Australia's surfing legends Mark Richards, Merewether has now been designated a National Surfing Reserve. None of this has anything to do with rips, but for years now I've been giving my Science of the Surf talks at the Dixon Park Surf Life Saving Club because there's often a rip straight out in front. This one is a classic because it clearly shows how "fixed" or "low-energy" rips can be identified by seemingly "calm gaps" between the breaking waves. This one had a longshore feeder flowing from right to left that then angled off into the main rip channel. It wasn't flowing particularly fast because the waves were fairly small and the channel was wide. Rips need a LOT of wave breaking and narrow channels to flow fast.

The most dangerous aspect of this rip is that it looks like the safest place to swim...and it's not. You can always tell it's Newcastle from the ships offshore...one could very well be the Pasha Bulker, which came ashore in a major East Coast Cyclone in June 2007!

Bronte Beach is a great beach, but it is also considered to be one of the most hazardous beaches in New South Wales, mostly because it almost always has a rip on the southern end called "The Bronte Express". This was taken in April 2008 during a fairly stormy day and it shows a distinct darker trough, or longshore feeder current, flowing from left to right (north to south) and then diverting offshore into the main part of the rip. You can clearly spot the rip by the dark gap between breaking waves. Due to the energetic wave conditions on the day, although this rip was channelised, it was on the verge of "popping out" and was starting to move laterally up and down the beach, which signifies the beginning of flash rip conditions. You can actually see streaks in the rip and turbulent clouds of water and sand just beyond the breakers in what is called the rip head, where the rip starts to slow down and decelerate.

The scary thing about this picture is that the flags look like they were placed right in front of the rip! The picture is a bit deceptive, because they weren't, but the rip was starting to shift and flash around and the beach was closed shortly after the picture was taken. Not a good day for swimming. Surfing was bad too because of the strong onshore winds creating messy wind waves on top of the swell. The guys trying to soak up a tan must have been English.

The rip of the month for January showed a massive rip on one of Aucklands extremely dangerous west coast beaches. Tragically, only a week after posting this picture, Sonny Fai a player for the Auckland Warriors National Rugby League team drowned in a rip at nearby Bethells Beach. One of his coaches drowned in similar conditions at the end of January on the same coastline.

There are some beaches that are just not safe for swimming. It is hoped that Sonnys drowning, a result of trying to save his younger brother who got caught by the rip but was saved, will encourage people to think twice about swimming outside the flags. If a young, strong and fit professional rugby player can't save himself from a strong rip current, what chance does the average person have?

The rip picture(s) this month shows another rip in New Zealand, but in contrast, this beach looks perfectly safe. Hot Water Beach is a famous tourist destination in the Coromandel Peninsula because at low tide, natural hot springs bubble up through the sand to the surface. The beach is also known for its rips and although the day I took this picture in 1999 was beautiful and calm, the presence of rocks has created a very subtle and weak rip to the left of the main rock. You can spot this rip because as the water flows offshore from the shoreline it meets the incoming water with the waves causing some surface rippling and disturbance. In other words, the surface of the rip looks different to the surrounding smoother water. I took this picture to show that rips can develop around rocks even on a very SAFE LOOKING day.

Now I show the picture during my educational talks because 30 minutes later the man walking in the shallow water had drowned. A 60 year old German tourist, he couldn't swim, got dragged out in the rip, panicked and had a heart attack. Before the accident happened, I took the picture of the signs up warning people about rips in english and in other languages, including German. What this shows is that if you don't understand what a rip is, signs like this are completely useless. He was the second person to drown in on that beach that week and several people drown on Hot Water Beach every year. Amazingly, we went back for a holiday in December 2009 and the same sign was there except now it's overgrown by vegetation! Signs based on text messages only are totally ineffective and don't work....it's as simple as that. They have no educational value at all. This drowning should never have happened.

If you recognise the picture, it was on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper on Saturday December 20, 2008.