Sunday, July 10, 2011

Low Tide Sometimes Isn't

So yesterday I took my new underwater camera base out to the Point Loma tidepools right around low tide ... and discovered that low tide isn't always low tide. It was a 1.7' low which turned out to be still high enough to cover all the tidepools with a pretty active swell. Putting my camera in that churning mess would have resulted in murky videos, assuming the camera didn't get washed out to sea.

While the effort was cinematically fruitless, it taught me this:


Because of the tide schedule, I'm about a week away from being able to use my new device.

4 comments:

Jedi Knight Ivyan said...

Where did you find that tide table?

I've been kicking around the idea of toting the tots to Capitola to look for fossils. But you have to go when the tide is it's absolute lowest. I haven't really been able to find a good tide table online yet.

K T Cat said...

Ivyan, wunderground.com has a nice marine forecast subpage for beach cities. You can see San Diego's here.

Jedi Knight Ivyan said...

Awesome! Thanks so much. I hadn't thought to look on a weather website.

tim eisele said...

Speaking of tides, a while back I was looking up "Amphidrome"[*], and found this article about Amphidromic Points. It seems that there are places in the ocean where the primary moon component of the tide is essentially zero (and the high/low tides basically circle around these points about every 12 hours). Tide calculations are clearly a lot more complicated than "high tide is when the moon is directly overhead, or directly underfoot".

[*] I was looking this up because there used to be an ice hockey arena in Houghton called "The Amphidrome" (reputedly the first purpose-built ice hockey arena in the world), and it got me wondering what "Amphidrome" even meant. I still don't see the connection between tides and hockey, but well, there you go.