How interesting...I can remember the ill on the beach - making me swim out to the RED FLAG and back...at the RED FLAG...the current out to sea was so strong that I had to cling onto the buoy for a quite a while in order to regain my strength to defeat it...eventually I gave up doing the crawl/breast-stroke and ended up on my back...by which time I had floated out of the strong current and that meant that I could swim back to shore quite easily.

Here is another article about rip tides/currents:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/824729/riptide_the_danger_and_how_to_survive.html