The National Weather Service has warned of dangerous rip currents at Lee and Charlotte county beaches from Wednesday morning through Friday evening

Money & World

The Editorial Team · July 28, 2026

A low close crop of a small wave breaking into white foam as it runs up a shallow shoreline, the water lit gold and brown, with no people, buildings or text in view.

Photo: Suki Lee / Pexels

What it changes

This is a three-day window, not an afternoon, and that is what makes it worth posting ahead of time. The warning takes effect on Wednesday morning and does not end until 8 p.m. on Friday, which covers the back half of a normal beach week for a county whose Gulf shoreline is a working part of the economy as well as a place people swim. The service is unusually blunt about the mechanism in its own text: rip currents can sweep even the best swimmers away from shore into deeper water. That sentence is doing specific work. Rip currents do not pull people under, they pull people out, and the danger comes from swimming against a current that is faster than any swimmer can sustain. The instruction the service gives is to swim near a lifeguard, and if caught, to relax and float rather than fight it, to swim along the shoreline if able, and to face the shore and call or wave for help if unable to escape. Two boundaries on this are worth being exact about, because both cut against the natural assumption. The first is geographic. Collier County is not in this statement. Naples, Marco Island and Vanderbilt Beach sit under the Miami forecast office, which had no active rip current or surf product on Tuesday evening, and a Lee County warning says nothing about Collier water either way. The second is that a rip current statement is the mildest of the surf products the service issues, one step below a High Surf Advisory, and it describes an expected hazard rather than an observed emergency. It is a reason to check the flag at the beach entrance before getting in the water, not a reason to stay off the beach.

The National Weather Service has warned that dangerous rip currents are expected at Lee and Charlotte county beaches from Wednesday morning through Friday evening.

The Rip Current Statement was issued by the service's Tampa Bay Ruskin office at 3:01 p.m. on Tuesday, July 28. It takes effect at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, July 29, and runs until 8 p.m. on Friday, July 31.

Six zones are covered: Pinellas, Coastal Hillsborough, Coastal Manatee, Coastal Sarasota, Coastal Charlotte and Coastal Lee. In Lee County the affected shoreline is the Gulf front, which includes Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel, Captiva, Bonita Beach and Lovers Key. Inland Lee is not part of the product.

The service rates the event moderate in severity, likely in certainty, and expected in urgency, which are the standard classifications attached to a hazard that is forecast rather than already observed.

Its statement of the risk is one sentence long. Rip currents, the service writes, can sweep even the best swimmers away from shore into deeper water.

The accompanying instruction is equally short. Swim near a lifeguard. If caught in a rip current, relax and float, and do not swim against the current. If able, swim in a direction following the shoreline. If unable to escape, face the shore and call or wave for help.

Collier County is not covered by this statement. Collier falls under the National Weather Service office in Miami rather than the one in Tampa Bay, and a check of the service's active alerts on Tuesday evening showed no rip current statement, surf advisory or other coastal hazard product in effect for Coastal Collier. Readers in Naples and on Marco Island should treat the Lee County warning as information about Lee County beaches.

A Rip Current Statement is the least severe of the surf hazard products the service issues. It is not a High Surf Advisory and it is not a warning of an emergency in progress. It is a forecast that conditions over the following three days are likely to produce currents strong enough to carry a swimmer out, and it is the reason beach entrances fly coloured warning flags.

This item carries no breaking flag because the hazard it describes begins on Wednesday morning.

Separately, and in a different county, a 16-year-old swimmer died on Tuesday afternoon after going missing in choppy water off the 2nd Avenue North beach end in Naples, according to the Naples Police Department. That incident is in Collier County, it preceded this statement by about an hour, and the two are not connected.

The National Weather Service has warned of dangerous rip currents at Lee and Charlotte county beaches from Wednesday morning through Friday evening

A 16-year-old swimmer died on Tuesday after going missing in choppy water off the 2nd Avenue North beach end in Naples, the police department says

The traffic light at Old San Carlos and Estero boulevards on Fort Myers Beach is working again, more than three years after Hurricane Ian took it out

The Ranchette Road arrest report says the man charged admitted killing his mother, but the Lee County Sheriff's Office still cannot positively identify the woman who died