November 2025 (ROTM#203) Tamarama Beach, NSW, Australia

Nowhere to swim.

Sydney’s Tamarama Beach is one of my favourite beaches on the planet and has appeared several times as a ROTM. That’s because I lived in the surf club as the resident caretaker for 4 years back in the 1990s and it is also where my Science of the Surf community talks and purple dye releases started. It’s just a great and beautiful beach and you are almost guaranteed to get a rip current…if not two.

It's a very narrow pocket beach and faces south-east so picks up the prevailing swell and it’s considered a particularly dangerous beach and it is! Fortunately it also has lifeguards year round and volunteer lifesavers on duty during the summer. Even so, swimming at Tama is not for the faint-hearted and the beach is closed by the lifeguards probably more than any other beach in Sydney due to the combination of large waves and rip currents. It’s not hard to see why in this picture of mine which shows a big, wide rip current flowing out through what seems to be half the beach. It’s the big green gap in the middle between the whitewater of the breaking waves.

In conditions like this, where would the lifeguards put the red and yellow flags? There’s no place to put them that’s really safe. Maybe to the left, but there’s rocks there and the water is feeding along the beach into the rip. The interesting thing about a rip current like this that is quite wide is that the wider the rip current, the slower they generally flow. But if you’re not a good swimmer, any offshore flowing current is dangerous regardless of speed. Beach closed!