May 2025 (ROTM#197) Freshwater Beach, Sydney, NSW, Australia

If you see this on the internet, don’t click on it! Except here.

Although I’m closing in on 200 Rips of the Month, it’s not always easy coming up with new pictures of rips. Mine tend to be of the same beaches so I sometimes have to rely on unlikely sources – like this one. I was reading the newspaper online one day and some annoying real estate prize draw pop up ad came up, but I was amazed to see that it had a great overhead beach picture of Sydney’s Freshwater Beach that had two prominent rip currents!

So I of course clicked on it, which was a big mistake that led me into a world of internet pain. I have no idea who or where it came from, but I did manage to get a screenshot before I was hit with a spam tsunami.

Freshwater is situated in Sydney’s Northern Beaches and is the first beach you get to after heading around the northern headland of Manly Beach. It’s one of my favourite beaches in Sydney and is generally pretty nice for swimming and doesn’t have rip currents much of the time. Not when this picture was taken though! There’s 3 rips that I can see. There’s a prominent channelised rip dominating the left side of the beach and one a bit further down the beach – look for the dark green gaps between the whitewater and sand bars. There’s also a narrow boundary rip current heading offshore along the headland at the far end of the beach.

Fun fact about Freshwater Beach: It’s also known as Harbord Beach and there’s a statue of Duke Kahanamoku on the northern headland to commemorate his 1915 visit where he introduced surfing to Australia.