Beach Ed

For this week’s learning story, I’d like to talk about what actually happened the previous week, which was beach ed! At first, I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t that keen on heading over to the beach because I just didn’t really feel like it, but I do have to say that in the end it was rather worth it. We learnt a range of different things, but if I went through it all, I’d be writing a giant story of a hundred paragraphs, so I’m going to go through one of the things that I really enjoyed learning about, which was rips.

At first, the idea of rips really scared me, because I thought that if I ever got caught in one I’d be done for, but the information we learnt really helped out. Apparently, first off you need to know how to identify where a rip may be. Avoid rocks, where the water is a slightly different colour (if it’s a white sand beach the water would be lighter, and if it’s a black sand beach the water would be darker), or where there seems to be calmer water, especially amongst waves. Those tips so helped out. Now that you know them, they seem so obvious.

The next step as to if you get caught in a rip is to stay calm. Don’t panic. If you do, that’ll only make things worse (as it does in almost any other threatening situation). Lie on your back and float, and let the rip take you away. Once the water stops feeling like as though it’s pulling, you’ve probably out of the rip, so then you can swim away. Make sure to swim across, and if the red-and-yellow lifeguard flags are out, try swim to them. If you can’t reach that far, then just swim as far away from the rip as you possibly can and then head back to shore.

Oh, and I nearly forgot! Another thing, before anything else, if you get caught in a rip, make sure to check if you can touch the ground. If you can, then just walk out of the rip - simple enough, right? I hope so; when the three lifeguard girls at the beach told us about it, it seems pretty self-explanatory, but whenever I search up images of a rip current it just seems to confuse me even more. I plan to give out this information to some other people, maybe not my friends since they already know too, but my family. I doubt that we’d ever get stuck in a situation such as a rip current, but it’s best to be safe than sorry, right? Then again, I don’t really visit the beach that often anymore. Why? Don’t ask me! I wouldn’t really know - I used to visit the beach a lot when I was a kid, but nowadays I don’t really. I think it’s because we moved to Hobsonville Point - there’s the wharf, yes, but it isn’t quite the same as the beach. Before we moved to Hobsonville Point, we lived in Browns Bay (near the beach) and then Murrays Bay, yet again, near the beach.