Swimming this afternoon at Good Harbor Beach, after the beach was closed to swimming. You could actually see the rip current when standing above the beach from the roadside.
Spindrifts Good Harbor Beach
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Published by Kimsmithdesigns
Documentary filmmaker, photographer, landscape designer, author, and illustrator. "Beauty on the Wing: Life Story of the Monarch Butterfly" currently airing on PBS. Current film projects include Piping Plovers, Gloucester's Feast of St. Joseph, and Saint Peter's Fiesta. Visit my websites for more information about film and design projects at kimsmithdesigns.com, monarchbutterflyfilm.com, and pipingploverproject.org. Author/illustrator "Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities! Notes from a Gloucester Garden."
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Spindrifts Good Harbor Beach
Good Morning Gloucester 
Riptides, like power tools, are really only dangerous for the uninitiated. The guy body surfing in this picture will likely be out in bigger waves this March when there isn’t anyone around to shriek about how crazy he is.
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The photo I didn’t include was of a little girl with the group.
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Riptides are dangerous and risky even for the most experienced swimmer’s – I imagine if you are in the authorities will warn you to get out. Even with lifeguards on duty…Older story below. I found as ten year old being a willow tree during high winds was fun blowing back and forth until I lost my grip and fell took sore for a few days after…Lesson learned the hard way here! 🙂 Dave
3 rescued from riptides in Gloucester
By Christopher J. Girard
Globe Correspondent / September 3, 2011
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The persons pictured seem to have wet suits or dry suits on. They are probably used to this sort of thing. What was the little girl wearing?
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A bathing suit.
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A little girl in a bathing suit should not have been surfing.
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To be clear, I was only there for about twenty minutes filming, late in the afternoon. While there I did not see a single surfer with a surf board. What I did see were some folks, mostly in swimsuits, trying to swim. I think when a decision is made to close a public beach it is as much for the safety of the public as it is for rescue workers.
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The people in your photos seem to be body surfers dressed for rough conditions. I doubt if they are supposed to be in the water when the beach is closed but I do not think them in danger. They probably know what to do if caught in an outward flowing rip current. Swimmers in bathing suits are another story and I wonder what the parents of the little girl were thinking.
This storm has really not been much here. The water is rough but it is long waves from offshore. It makes for good photos but is not particularly scary for most ship lengths. It can cause trouble though. My wife and a friend were hauling lobster gear in Ipswich Bay many years ago from a relatively small boat. There were long left over waves like these coming in from a hurricane offshore but it was not particularly rough. A trap was stuck down and they pulled on it hard with the Durahaul winch. Instead of the trap coming up one of those long waves took advantage of the starboard rail being hove down to lift the port side up. The boat capsized and it took me days to sort the resulting mess out.
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There were dudes surfing at Cape Hedge. The waves were decent for New England. Not ankle lappers.
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It’s hard to understand why people make the choices they do sometimes. A little girl? Even near the ocean would be crazy. I hope these people are safe too.
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