I’ve been running on the beach all spring so far (at dawn–totally alone, and it’s great) but I don’t like running at high tide, and would be glad to run when it’s hotter if I could find out when the high tide and low tide is going to be. The NY Times runs this info daily, though as I remember it’s far from clear reading, and I don’t always remember to pick up a copy every day.
So: what’s a good online source for this info that’s going to give clear, readable info about the tides (on the south shore of Long Island, not that that’s going to vary much from anyplace else, I suppose)? Also is there maybe a handy rule of thumb so if I run at low tide on Thursday, I can figure out what time low tide is the next Tuesday? I had to stop halfway through today because it sucks running at high tide–the beach is all lopsided, one foot’s always wet, the other’s stuck in the dry sand. url, anyone? Thanks.
I am not sure about New York and Long Island, but it is my understanding of most east coast, that they are diurnal, meaning two highs and two lows per day, and that the time between High and low is 6.25 hours. You can buy tide clocks with movements time at 6.25 hours to match the tidal frequency. There is a ton of information about this on wikipedia I worked for a national marine parts chain based on the east coast with store in on the west coast, and it flustered me to no end to get calls about the ad they ran in the paper and trade publications advertising Tide Clocks and having to explain to people that we didn’t stock them in our stores in the west because we have irregular tides that don’t follow a unified time between high and low that the time changes daily.
I have found tide predictions on NOAA’s web page before.
Since the question has been answered, can I make a tangential recommendation of TideTool for the Palm OS platform - I live quite close to the sea, and this is probably the most-used application on my Treo.
-and it regularly boggles people’s minds that I can predict the tides using my cellphone.
There are similar programs available for Windows Mobile and (I think) Symbian platforms.
Tides run about 55 minutes later each day, so if you have a high tide at noon on Monday, the tide will again be high at about 12:55 pm on Tuesday. (Yes, I know there is another high tide in between, so the tides will be High at noon Monday, High again just before 12:30 am Tuesday morning, etc.) Basically, if the high tide is around lunch time one weekend, the next weekend the highs will be around breakfast and dinner time.
You can interpolate for back-of-the-envelope estimates.
Naive followup question: Why is there such a wide disparity for places not that far away from each other? I would think that Jones Inlet and Bellmore and Long Beach are not that far apart, maybe five or ten miles as the crow barks–but if you look at this chart (for next month) http://www.tidesonline.com/showtable.php?IDNUM=472&stationname=SandyHook&next=1
their tides are separated by many hours: is my geography screwy? ( I think I pass Bellmore on my way to Jones Beach, and Fire Island is just a little bit further east–if I’m not mistaken, it’s the next big beach to the east of Jones Beach.) Is it possible for places so close to have such widely differing tides, or do I just misunderstand how tides work? For that matter, why is there is such a large difference between Fire Island Coast Guard Station, Fire Island Radiobeacon and West Fire Island–I would have thought those three locales are very close to one another.