Where to find reliable tide times online?

[Bill]

As the title says really, I've found tide times.org but it seems a little unreliable, or there's something peculiar about Swanage that I'm missing - See http://www.tidetimes.org.uk/Swanage-20110923.html Tides should be 6ish hours apart AFAIK?

So what sites do you guys use?

[Amused2death]

I'm not a nautical person, however a quick Google came up with these.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/coast_and_sea/tide_t...
http://easytide.ukho.gov.uk/EasyTide/EasyTide/inde...



Anything there that may be of use to you?

Further to that, I found this.

http://www.climbers-club.co.uk/tides/tides.html

Which seems to show a graph of water levels that aren't exactly evenly spaced time wise. Could this explain your situation?

HTH

[kieranbennett]

When I've sailed in the solent I've always been told the Island can affect the tides massivly, with double highs and short lows.

This site seems to explain it; http://www.climbers-club.co.uk/tides/tides.html

[Bill]

Aha, that makes sense, although I've found times when the Beeb and tide times.org agree but the locals say something else

[Gwagon111]

kieranbennett said:

When I've sailed in the solent I've always been told the Island can affect the tides massivly, with double highs and short lows.

This site seems to explain it; http://www.climbers-club.co.uk/tides/tides.html

The isle of wight causes 2 tidal phenomenon. One is a short duration ebb tide, the other is called the young flood stand. This is a slackening of the stream, 2 hours after low water. The double high water isn't actually caused by the 2 entrances to the Solent or the isle of wight.

http://www.bristolnomads.org.uk/stuff/double_tides...

Edited by Gwagon111 on Monday 26th September 11:21

[don4l]

Bill said:

Aha, that makes sense, although I've found times when the Beeb and tide times.org agree but the locals say something else

Swanage is a secondary port, so all predictions that you find will be derived from Portsmouth.

Swanage seems to have weird tides. When Portsmouth has high water at noon or midnight, Swanage will have HW 2h50m earlier. When Portsmouth has HW at 06:00 or 18:00, then Swanage has HW 1h5m later.

Low water, however, seems to be always 1h5m before Portsmouth.

With such a huge variation, I suspect that accurate predictions are a bit difficult. So, I would just use the site that you have already found - but don't bet large sums of money on its accuracy.



Don
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