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“If you really want people to learn about rips, tell them that sharks live in rips,” says coastal scientist Professor Rob Brander, who’s frustrated by the failure of beachgoers to recognise the greatest threat in our waters.
Arriving for lunch at the beachside Tamarama Kiosk, Brander can’t stop surveilling the surf for rips and other dangers. “I always have lifeguard eyes on. It’s a curse in a way. Because you can see when somebody’s going to go in a rip, you can see it before it even happens.”
Lunch with Rob Brander, known as Dr Rip, at the Tamarama Kiosk. Rob has a new book coming out about dangers on our beaches.Credit: Brook Mitchell
Brander is a coastal geomorphologist, a student of the shape and structure of beaches. Most people, though, know him as Dr Rip. He earned the name by jumping into rips for science to test the best ways of surviving, and releasing harmless purple dye into the surf on NSW’s beaches to show that rips – strong currents – are unpredictable shapeshifters.
They often circulate, returning to the beach, but sometimes flow well beyond the waves. They form in channels next to rocks and sandbanks. They can move faster than world-record swimmers, and little ones can be lethal.
You can’t expect a rip-free spot (usually marked by the flags if the beach is patrolled by lifeguards) to be rip free when you visit on another day, says Brander. As if to prove his point, the usually rippy beach at Tamarama is rip free when we arrive for lunch on the hottest September day in more than 50 years.
Chicken burgers at lunch with Rob Brander, rip specialist, at the Tamarama Beach Cafe.Credit: Brook Mitchell
Brander knows the beach well. A volunteer lifesaver and a lifemember of its surf lifesaving club, he lived in the clubhouse as caretaker while doing his doctorate in the 1990s. Best gig ever.
He arrived for lunch in board shorts, hoping for a body-surf. But the huge swell was the stuff of neck injuries. Sizable waves were dumping in shallow water.
Now living at Coalcliff, south of Sydney, Brander’s career changed tack in 2001, when he started giving public talks at the surf club about the causes of rips. He was as shocked then as he is now by how few people could recognise a rip, considering four million Australians are estimated to have been caught in one.
Contrary to what many people think, the white foamy bit of the surf is not where rips lurk. White is nice, goes the saying, and green is mean. In other words, look out for dark channels of water. They are rip currents.
These talks turned the academic who teaches at the University of NSW into a public safety advocate; he started a website called the Science of the Surf (SOS), and The Beach Safety Research Group at the University of NSW.
He was recognised with a Eureka Prize for promoting public understanding of scientific research, and an Order of Australia, to add to his shelves stacked with hundreds of tiny bottles of beach sand collected from around the world.
The second edition of Dr Rip’s Essential Beach Book, first published in 2010, being released on October 1, lives up to its subtitle: Everything you need to know about surf, sand and rips.
It discusses far more entertainingly than I ever imagined – and yes, that was a low sandbar – why sand is different colours and shapes. It includes these fun facts:
And the biggest mystery: Where does sand go when it is washed out to sea? Nobody knows, he says. And how does the same sand seem to return to the same beach? Another marine mystery.
On my list of mysteries is how a boy who was afraid of the water until he was 10, and grew up in Toronto, Canada, where the water was cold, scary and near a nuclear plant, became a beach safety advocate in Australia.
Rob Brander, known as Dr Rip, goes for a swim before lunch at the Tamarama Kiosk.Credit: Brook Mitchell
Brander, 58, attributes his love of beaches to a decade of family childhood vacations in Cape Cod on the north-east coast of the United States. His excitement would rise as the sides of the roads got sandier, and would reach a crescendo when they crested the last hill.
Being greeted by the glorious reflection off the water, the smell of the sea, the sounds of the beach was the best feeling in the world, he writes. This love of beaches resulted in an undergraduate degree in physical geography and a masters degree in coastal geomorphology at the University of Toronto.
How he became a popular beach safety advocate who made Australia home was the sum of four “life-changing moments”. They were:
Scene one: Bondi Beach, January 1992. Brander arrives in Australia for the first time. Walking from Coogee to Bondi, he is stunned to see people swimming and surfing in clean beaches in a city of Sydney’s size. “It was the most amazing coastline I had ever seen.” He body-surfs for the first time. “You look happier than a pig in shit,” a fellow Canadian tells him. “I was. That first wave was addictive, it’s magic, it is a gift,” he recalls.
Scene two: Bronte, a few days later. Another coastal scientist says, “Look at the rip.” Brander can’t see it. “It’s right there, and I couldn’t see it. That moment perked my interest in rip currents. I realised, how can I study this out of books when I can’t see it?”
Dr Rip demonstrated the movements of a rip current by releasing dye into the surf in 2007. In a survey, 29 per cent of people said they did not know how to look for a rip.
It is about now that our large, juicy chicken burgers arrive, with a berry smoothie on the side for him. They’ve got good mayo, a decent amount of sliced tomato and salad and nearly everything you’d want for lunch at a beachside cafe.
Scene three: 1999, Coromandel beach, New Zealand. Brander takes a photo of a tiny rip near rocks on an otherwise calm beach to illustrate to his students that even in a small surf where there are rocks, there can also be a rip. Soon after an older German tourist, travelling with family, is pulled dead from the surf.
When Brander processes the film in his camera a few days later, he notices that the man who fatally drowned is in the photo he took, standing waist deep in the rip.
“That was a huge moment that changed my life,” says Brander. “I felt this obligation that I need to teach people about [the dangers of rip currents] because for me, the beach is a place of joy.”
Scene four: In 2005, Brander hears a strange tinkling sound while walking around a small coral atoll in the Maldives after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. It was the skeleton of a man, still fully clothed, who had drowned. Like something out of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the bones were chiming against the coral as the waves ebbed and flowed.
The experience disillusioned him so much that he took leave without pay to think about his future. “I felt that the humanitarian aspect of water safety was more important to me than the measurements we were taking, looking at the physical coastal science. I wanted to help people. ”
Being back at Tamarama makes Brander a bit wobbly. It was where he got to know surfers, lifeguards and volunteer lifesavers, and saw them traumatised after pulling people alive and dead out of rips.
It was as scarring for those who were rescued. New research by Brander and others following interviews with 50 people who had survived a rip found some “never set foot in the ocean again, which is terrible. It is a very scary experience.”
Has his knowledge of what can go wrong affected his teenage daughters and wife? He doesn’t think so. “I’ve taught them to know when the waves are too big it’s too rough. You just don’t go in.”
Because they live near the beach, they can always come back when it is safer. “When you have people who travel a long way to get somewhere, they’re going to go in the water no matter what.”
Brander has dessert, a supersized cookie stuffed with Nutella. The sugar must go to his brain because he gets frustrated about how our public education campaign hasn’t kept up with the past 20 years of research on how rips behave.
During COVID, more people started visiting unpatrolled beaches, a trend that has continued. Rip currents are the No.1 coastal hazard, contributing to 20 per cent of deaths on beaches every year. This year, there were 28 rip-related deaths, nearly all thought to have occurred on unpatrolled beaches and away from lifesaving services.
“Telling someone to swim in between the flags is great, and it is always the safest place to swim, but if we really want to get serious about reducing drowning on beaches, we need to move beyond that. We have to do better at finding ways to educate people who swim on unpatrolled beaches, too. ”
He writes about being caught in a supersized rip 300 metres off an Auckland beach.
Brander started thinking of the old advice, “just swim to the side”.
“That was good advice, but possibly not so good when the rip current was so wide I couldn’t see the side.”
Then he thought of the other advice: “Don’t worry, the rip current will eventually bring you back to the beach.” Would it really?
Many rips circulate, returning to the beach or ending after the waves. “All I could see were walls of water. Finally, I reminded myself that I should heed the advice ‘relax and float, and don’t panic’.”
This provided him with a little comfort.
He was in the rip to measure its speed and trajectory.
Brander writes that it travelled almost 300 metres along the beach in a channel feeding the rip current, which then took him almost 400 metres offshore at speeds approaching those of swimming world records.
“It was quite a ride, but if the boat hadn’t been there, I would have been in big trouble.”
The changing science means the best advice is what Surf Life Saving Australia calls the Think Line: STOP to check for rips before entering the water or even the beach, LOOK for other dangers, and PLAN how to stay safe.
“It would be great if everyone knew how to spot rips, but it’s not easy, so we need to get everyone to stop and think about beach safety, and learn how to identify a rip. If we can educate people a little about rips so they know that rips are dangerous and they should avoid them, that’s probably the best you can expect.”
Before we say goodbye, we drive past nearby beaches to check the surf. Not much of a rip at Bondi, but Bronte has a flash rip – caused when a few big waves break. He jumped out to take a photo. Expect to see it on Brander’s Rip of the Month on ScienceoftheSurf.
Dr Rip’s Essential Beach Book: Everything you need to know about surf, sand and rips, publication date October1, 2023, New South Publishing, RRP $34.99.
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