March 2024 (ROTM#183) Sandon Point Beach, NSW, Australia
Where’s the rip and where’s the sign?
II haven’t got a picture of a rip in this one, but there’s some important messages in these pictures. Sandon Point Beach is in Bulli, NSW. The beach is about 900 m long and is a beautiful, easily accessible beach that is very popular. It has a Surf Lifesaving Club at the northern end, which is where the lifeguard and volunteer lifesavers patrol and set up the red and yellow flags. The rest of the beach is exposed to more wave energy and there are often channelised rip currents along the beach. The problem is that a LOT of people swim along the main part of the beach which does not have flags, is not patrolled, but is the easiest part of the beach to get to!
Last Sunday my family went to the beach and noticed that the volunteer surf lifesavers had put up this ‘Danger Rip’ sign and had a rescue board in front of it. We were lucky enough to walk straight by it to see it and I was impressed. But there were a few problems with the sign. First, unless you walked straight past it, you wouldn’t have seen it. Second, there was no rip current at all along the entire beach that day! It was actually a very safe day for swimming. However, if people saw the sign and looked for a rip, they wouldn’t see any evidence of one, which would be confusing. They might also end up having a perfectly safe time in the water and end up losing confidence in seeing Danger Rip signs in the future.
The purpose of the sign is to deter people from entering the water in that location, which is good (particularly if there had been a rip current there!). So signs like this are very important and should be visible to beachgoers. But the location of where they put the sign is a bit of an issue. The picture on the right was taken from close to the shoreline. Anybody walking along the each wouldn’t notice the sign at all. There’s lots of evidence to show that warning signs on beaches aren’t as effective as we’d like to think, but there also needs to be some thought put into where you actually put the signs so that people actually get the message.