November 2012 (ROTM#47) Royal National Park, Sydney, Australia

This month it's a very different type of rip current. Not all rips flow off sandy beaches in channels between bars. This is a tiny beach at the southern end of the Royal National Park in Sydney (near Otford) only accessible by boat or foot. Amazing how they managed to build the little cottages and shacks! The beach has numerous outcrops of a rock platform which underlies the sandy beach.

On the day I took this picture the surf was pretty big, about 3 m + and there weren't many rips around, just a lot of water pushing in. But if you look at the middle of the beach you can see a clear darker channel heading offshore a little way from the beach. This channel was squeezed between two rock reef outcrops forming a perfect conduit for water to drain offshore and although you can't tell from the photo, it was pumping. Technically, we'd probably call this a topographic rip as it's created by the fixed rock topography that's exposed. It's another reminder that swimming next to rocks and exposed reefs can be dangerous in any sort of wave conditions.

Structural rip to the extreme