A rip current doesn't pull you under. It takes you out to sea. What drowns people is fighting it.
ACT
- Don't swim against it. Not even a competitive swimmer can: it can run faster than two meters per second. You would wear yourself out in a few minutes, for nothing.
- Float first. On your back, arms and legs spread, head back, ears in the water. Breathe slowly. The cold shock and the panic pass within a minute or two, and this current does not drag you under.
- Raise one arm and shout. It's the signal lifeguards recognize. Do it while you float.
- Swim parallel to the beach. A rip is a narrow channel, a few meters to a few dozen meters wide. Thirty meters of swimming along the shore is often enough to get out.
- Come back at an angle, helped by the breaking waves: they are what pushes you toward the beach.
- If you can't get out, let it carry you. Many rips curve around and release the swimmer just beyond the breaking waves, sometimes bringing them back toward shore. Float, save your strength, keep signaling.
ADAPT
Someone else is caught. Don't swim out to them: many rip current victims went in to rescue someone. Call for help (112 or 911, or the lifeguard post), keep the person in sight without looking away, shout to them to swim along the beach, and throw them anything that floats: a board, an empty cooler, a ball, a closed jerrycan.
You have a surfboard or a bodyboard. Keep it. It holds you up, makes you visible, and lets you paddle across the current.
You're with a child. Hold them against you, on their back, head out of the water. Don't swim against the current with them: float, shout, and drift together until the current weakens.
The water is cold. Cold shock makes you gasp for the first minute. Don't swim during that time: calm your breathing while floating, then act. Once you're out, see Hypothermia.
Before you go in: spot them. A rip current can often be seen from the beach, especially from higher ground:
- a stretch where waves aren't breaking, while they break on both sides;
- water that is darker, deeper, or on the contrary brown with stirred-up sand;
- a choppy, rippled surface in a channel;
- foam, seaweed or debris moving out to sea.
Swim between the flags on lifeguarded beaches. On the French Atlantic coast these currents are called baïnes, and they are often strongest on a falling tide.
UNDERSTAND
Waves keep bringing water onto the beach. That water has to go back out, and it takes the easiest paths: a dip in the sand, a gap between two sandbars, the side of a jetty or rocks. The backflow concentrates in those channels and forms a narrow, fast current heading out to sea. It stays at the surface and fades beyond the zone where waves break.
That's why the way out is sideways. The current is strong but narrow: you don't beat it head-on, you leave it by the side. And that's why floating works: a floating body doesn't sink, and the current always slows down eventually.
Drowning comes from exhaustion and from water inhaled in panic. To help someone who swallowed water, see Drowning.