Shark Trouble by Peter Benchley Page A

fall sharply, carrying you with it. If you don’t struggle or resist, the undertow will carry you for a few feet (perhaps more, but not much more) and will then dissipate. Buoyed by the air in your lungs, you will rise to the surface, and you can swim back to shore. You may find yourself in water over your head, but if you’re not comfortable being in water deeper than you are tall, you are, in the purest sense of the phrase, out of your depth.
    Runout or Sea Puss
    A common cause of multiple simultaneous problems is known both as a “runout” and a “sea puss.” Somewhere offshore of a relatively straight beach there will be an invisible sandbar or shoal that has built up over a long period. Untold millions of tons of water will flow over the bar toward shore, until, at last, the level of the water inside the bar exceeds the water level outside the bar, at which moment, inevitably, the water must begin to flow back seaward.
    If there is a weak spot in the sandbar, it may collapse and create a funnel-like path through the bar. The enormous volume of water—which always seeks the easiest path to equilibrium—will rush toward the funnel with unimaginable power and irresistible force.
    Runouts happen frequently, and they can be seen from the beach. People watching one have described the scene as like seeing the entire ocean running down a drain. A strip of water leading out to sea, perhaps ten yards wide, perhaps fifty, will look different from the rest of the ocean. It will definitely have its own motion; it may contain short, choppy, foamy waves; the water will look murky and sandy from turbulence; all manner of flotsam—pieces of wood, seaweed, trash—will be speeding seaward in the strip. If there is wave action over the sandbar, the runout will appear as a gap in the surf, for this is where the bar has collapsed. Once beyond the sandbar, the strip will vanish as the water disperses and the runout has … well … run out.
    For veteran surfers, runouts are a blessing, for they provide effortless transport over the bar and beyond the waves. Surfers know that if at any point they change their minds, they can return to calm water simply by paddling across the runout until they’re out of it.
    Swimmers caught in runouts have that option, too, but most either don’t know it or, in shock and surprise, forget it. They panic and, intuitively, try to resist the force of the runout instead of, counterintuitively, surrendering to it and, when they’re ready, swimming across and out of it.
    Swimmers have another option, too, but it takes a cool head and a practiced eye to choose it. If a swimmer caught in a runout can see the sandbar offshore (or the waves breaking on it) and can determine that it isn’t too far to swim safely back from, she can—no kidding—relax and enjoy the ride. The runout will carry the swimmer past the bar and, perhaps twenty or twenty-five yards farther out, will dissipate, leaving her to return to shore—maybe even pleasantly, by riding one or more of the waves that break over the bar.
    That second option may be a bit more of a challenge than the average swimmer wants to assume, but once more, if you’re not fit enough to swim, kick, float, or dog-paddle for a couple of hundred yards in the ocean, don’t go in.
    Undertows and runouts are phenomena that affect only swimmers, for they occur
in
the water, or, in the case of runouts, offshore. You can’t be caught in one if you don’t go swimming. That’s not quite the statement-of-the-obvious that it appears, for there
is
one ocean imp that can reach up onto the beach and grab you (or, especially, your small child) and drag you into deep water. An old Environmental Science Services pamphlet called it a “killer at the seashore.” Its common name is a “rip.”
    Rip
    The reason a rip is so dangerous is that it actually forms
on
the beach. Children wading in