December 2025 (ROTM#204) Tamarama Beach, NSW, Australia

Pay attention to the yellow signs!

It’s back to Tamarama for the last Rip of the Month of my 17th year of doing this! I find it hard to believe that I’ve being doing it for that long and that I’ve managed to keep finding different images of rip currents. There must be some sort of Guiness Book of World Records entry for this….

So it’s back to Tamarama, which I described in last months ROTM. The reason I chose this picture is because I took it on the same day as the November ROTM. The only difference is that this one is taken from beach level. The rip is channelised and is flowing out through the big wide dark gap between breaking waves. Would you know that was a rip current if you were there? What if there were no ‘Dangerous Current/No Swimming’ signs? Imagine this was a lovely beach along the coast and you were on holiday…would you go in? Rips are always harder to spot from the beach so it really does help to get a bit of elevation if possible – the perspective from height for the November ROTM really makes it easier to spot rips.

And always, always, always be wary of swimming at any narrow embayed beach exposed to wave breaking. That water coming in with the breaking waves has to go back out somewhere and on a narrow beach, that doesn’t leave many safe places to enter the water.