HOW TO SPOT A RIP CURRENT:
IT'S WHERE THE WATER LOOKS EASIEST AND SAFEST, with no waves breaking or rolling in.
NEVER ENTER THE SEA HERE.
If you get caught in a rip, DON'T FIGHT IT. You can't swim back to shore against it; you will become exhausted and drown.
Instead, SWIM ACROSS IT, parallel to shore. You'll soon be out of the current and can then easily swim back.
Boost, please, and make sure your friends and family know this when they hit the beach.
@ArmyGirl Yep. Grew up five minutes from the beach (albeit at a much more northern latitude), learned this early on.
We had a different term for rips, a term not really suitable for a family fediverse.
@marcas Might you honor us by putting in a comment with a content warning?
I'm so interested in knowing what it was. Grew up by a touristy beach and only ever heard it called a rip current.
@dawni @joelmartinez The most common term — the one your parents would use when warning you about them — was “undertow”, which is technically incorrect. (Undertow is a thing, but that thing is not a rip current.)
But we kids always called them “sea pussies”.
@joelmartinez @dawni The idea being that the sand being sucked out to sea turns the rip a bit whitish and, I guess, pus-like. Which, yeah, sometimes.
But not always by any means. And anyway, nice try, but like it or not — and no longer being a giggling snotnosed prepubescent brat, I don’t particularly like it myself — it’s sea pussy.
Now *this* is useful information I can take with me to the beach. Thanks, @marcas
Not to rip on the 14-year-old we all once were, because pus kinda makes sense, but I truly don't get how or why it's a pussy. And here I sit in my old age
@marcas That's so sad.
Last weekend, tourists in three separate incidents died in Panama City Beach on the same day during a double-red flag, likely from rip currents.
(In Florida, a flag system warns about things like jellyfish and currents. Double-red means it's so dangerous it's closed and you could be arrested if caught swimming).
People just don't understand the danger. Almost every time, had they been better informed about what to do, they would have been fine.
@greene Thanks, but really, I’m just passing it along, as are all the people boosting this post. It *is* good advice, though!
I grew up very close to a beach and learned this as a little kid. Most people don’t grow up near beaches and, too often, don’t learn it. Hence my eagerness to pass it along — it really can save your life, and it’s stupidly easy (though counterintuitive).
When I was a child I got caught in one of these in the Atlantic Ocean. I had a boogie board and couldn’t figure out why I kept drifting further and further out. I kept swimming and was getting nowhere, getting scared and frustrated. Thankfully a friend’s dad realized what was going on and swam out to me and got us back. He explained rip currents to my parents and me. Forever grateful!
@marcas I got caught in one of these (when I was 13, I think?) and the swimming parallel-to-shore thing really works.
One warning, though: It's almost never this easy to spot from where you enter the water itself. The higher up you are, the more visible it is.
I remember getting caught in a rip current around 8 years old, when I lived in Florida. I wasn't dragged underwater, thank God. But while playing some aquatic variant of "tag", I suddenly found myself moving *very* quickly out to sea, away from my friends.
My friends went to shore to tell my mother, while I hauled ass about 100 feet parallel to the shore, because I had been given this lesson about a billion times in school and in scouts. Then I went in to shore. I was a little tired, but okay.
Mom met me at the shore, and she seemed freaked out. I didn't quite grasp why; I had just done what I'd been told to do in that situation, *of course* I was safe.
I had no idea rip currents were so dangerous until I was quite a bit older.
@marcas that's some sound advice that I as a certified scuba diver can only second:
DON'T FIGHT CURRENTS, BECAUSE YOU CANNOT AND WONT WIN!
Exactly!
@marcas this ad about them from 1990 stuck in my head
In the early 1940s, my late mother was a kid from the German heavy industry Ruhr area. Her entire school fled from the allied bombing attacks (bombing of civilian targets was ugly custom in WW II) to the Baltic Sea coast. One beach day, several members of her class were caught in a strong current. Mom made it to shore by herself, but the teachers had to get in and rescue pupils that had drifted very far away. This was one of the terrifying stories mom occasionally told.
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