Sydney has over a hundred beaches and swimming is central to how the city lives. It is also the thing most likely to hurt a visitor here, and the reasons are not the ones people expect.
Rip currents
A rip is a narrow channel of water flowing back out to sea, formed where waves push water up the beach and it finds a path to return. They can move faster than an Olympic swimmer.
Rips are responsible for the large majority of coastal drownings in Australia — around 20 to 30 deaths a year, more than sharks, crocodiles, snakes, bushfires and floods combined.
How to spot one. Counter-intuitively, a rip is often the calmest-looking water on the beach: a gap in the breaking waves, darker in colour, sometimes with foam or sand streaming seaward through it. Holidaymakers walk into them precisely because they look like the easy place to swim.
How to escape one. Do not swim against it — that is what exhausts and drowns people.
- Float. Rips do not pull you under; they carry you out. Conserve energy.
- Raise one arm and shout, if anyone is watching.
- Swim parallel to the beach, across the current, to get out of the channel — then in on the breaking waves.
- Or simply float until it dissipates, which most rips do beyond the breakers, and then swim back at an angle.
The flags
Swim between the red and yellow flags. This is the entire safety system in one sentence.
The flags mark the section a surf lifesaving patrol is actively watching, and they are moved through the day as conditions change — often specifically to keep swimmers away from a rip.
Outside the flags, on an unpatrolled beach, or outside patrol hours, nobody is watching. Every year people drown at Bondi and elsewhere fifty metres from a flagged area.
Patrols generally run from about September to April on the main beaches, weekends and holidays more widely. Yellow-and-red flags mean patrolled; a red flag alone means the beach is closed.
Other flags and signs
Black-and-white quartered flags mark a surfcraft area — boards, not swimmers.
Signs at the entrance to most beaches show current hazards.
The sun
Australia has the highest rates of skin cancer in the world, and the UV index in a Sydney summer routinely reaches 11 or above, which is classed as extreme.
Unprotected skin burns in about fifteen minutes.
The public health message here is slip, slop, slap, seek, slide — slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, slap on a hat, seek shade, slide on sunglasses. It is taught in schools and it is not a joke.
Reapply sunscreen every two hours and after swimming. Cloud cover does not help much; UV passes through it.
Sharks
Sydney has a small number of shark encounters and they attract enormous attention. Statistically the risk is very low — the beaches most people swim at are netted or patrolled with drones, and fatal attacks in the harbour or at the main ocean beaches are rare.
Sensible precautions: do not swim at dawn or dusk, do not swim alone far offshore, avoid murky water and river mouths after rain, and leave the water if told to.
Bluebottles
Far more likely to affect you. Pacific man o’ war, called bluebottles here, wash up in numbers on easterly winds and their sting is painful.
Treatment is hot water — as hot as you can bear, for twenty minutes. Not vinegar, which is for tropical box jellyfish and makes bluebottle stings worse. Lifeguards have both and know which is which.
If the beach has blue tentacles along the tideline, they are in the water.
Rock fishing and cliffs
The other underestimated hazard. People are swept off rock platforms by unexpected waves along the Sydney coast every year. Do not turn your back on the sea on a rock shelf, and stay behind fences on the clifftop walks.
Ocean pools
Sydney has around forty ocean pools — tidal swimming baths cut into rock platforms, washed by waves at high tide, almost all of them free.
They are the answer if the surf is intimidating or the rips are running: the water is seawater, the depth is known, and there is no current.
Bondi Icebergs is the famous one and charges a small fee. Bronte, Coogee’s Wylie’s Baths and McIver’s Ladies Baths, Mahon Pool at Maroubra, North Curl Curl and Fairy Bower at Manly are all free or nearly so and are among the best swimming anywhere.
Harbour beaches
Calmer than the ocean beaches and better for children — Shark Beach at Nielsen Park (netted), Balmoral, Clontarf, Camp Cove, Shelly Beach at Manly.
Water quality after heavy rain is the thing to check; the state publishes Beachwatch ratings daily and stormwater runoff makes harbour beaches unswimmable for a day or two after a downpour.
If you are not a strong swimmer
Stay between the flags, stay where you can stand, and use the ocean pools. There is no shame in it and the lifesavers would far rather you did.