As a surfer, understanding how rips and currents work is essential to staying safe and catching the best waves. Rips are strong currents that flow out from shore and can be dangerous if you don't know how to navigate them. Similarly, currents can be unpredictable, so it's important to learn about them before heading out into the surf.
Rips and currents are no doubt dangerous but they can also provide a helpful 'conveyer belt' so you can get out when the waves are big. They should only be used
by surfers with a good understanding of the ocean and that have
heaps of experience. If you do ever find yourself stuck in a rip and
getting dragged out to sea the most important thing is to STAY CALM. If you start to panic you will quickly start to lose energy and wear yourself out.
What you want to do is firstly find any buoyancy aids nearby if there are any eg. surfboard, bodyboard, paddleboard etc and cling onto them. If your just swimming you could lie on your back, stay calm and then swim horizontal out of the rip. If you try and swim directly against it you will wear yourself out not move anywhere. So just relax. wave for a lifeguard and swim or paddle horizontally to the direction of where the water is taking you and then swim in. Similarly if you see somebodytrapped in a rip alert the nearest lifeguard and do not go after them, 2 people stuck in a rip is a much bigger scenario for the lifeguards to deal with as oppose to one.
How to spot and avoid a rip current
Rip currents can be difficult to spot, but are sometimes identified by a channel of churning, choppy water on the sea's surface.
Even the most experienced beachgoers can be caught out by rips, so don’t be afraid to ask lifeguards for advice. They will show you how you can identify and avoid rips.
The best way to avoid rips is to choose a lifeguarded beach and always swim between the red and yellow flags, which have been marked based on where is safer to swim in the current conditions. This also helps you to be spotted more easily, should something go wrong.
The difference between a rip and a tide
Rip currents can flow quickly, are unpredictable, and come about from what happens to waves as they interact with the shape of the sea bed. In contrast, a rip tide is caused by tidal movements, as opposed to wave action, and is a predictable rise and fall of the water level.
All about Tides
Both the moon and sun affect the tides, but since the moon is much closer to the earth (384,400 km instead of 149,600,000 km), it has more than twice the effect of the sun, even though it is much smaller. So, to understand tides it's best to start with the moon and the lunar tide.
The earth isn't fixed rigidly in space, and as the moon orbits, it attracts the earth round in a monthly orbit of its own. So the earth has a small orbit caused by the moon in addition to its annual one round the sun. It is the gravitational pull of the moon on the earth which keeps the earth in its monthly orbit.
This is similar to when you whirl a weight round on a piece of string. It is only by constantly pulling on the string that you prevent the object from flying off. If you stop pulling completely, by letting go on the string, the object does fly off. Gravity acts in the same way as you pulling on the string, and prevents the earth from flying off. However, unlike the string, the attractive pull of gravity gets weaker as the distance between the objects gets larger (and it becomes stronger, of course, the closer they get). The earth is large, so the pull of gravity on the side of the earth nearer the moon is stronger than the pull on the side of the earth farther from the moon.
The pull of the moon's gravity is just enough to keep the earth in its monthly orbit, but it is a bit stronger on the surface of the earth facing the moon (near side) and weaker on the far side. This means that on the near side, the moon tends to pull anything that's free to move towards it. In the same way, on the far side, there isn't quite enough gravitational pull, so that anything that's free to move tends to fly off, away from the moon. So on the near side they are pulled into a bulge towards the moon, and on the far side, they pile up into a bulge away from the moon.
As the earth spins, different parts of the world move under the two bulges of high water and experience high tides, giving the familiar two tides a day around Britain. In some parts of the world, local effects can mean only one tide a day, or even none.
Between the two bulges are two troughs of low water, producing two low tides a day. The sun also creates a very similar though smaller effect (the solar tide) and it is the interaction of the lunar and solar tides that causes spring and neap tides.
Commentaires