The restless tides

We like buying our movie experiences in the bargain bin at WallyWorld.  I then rip the DVDs and we keep them on an external hard drive.  One of our recent purchases was Prince of Tides, which I don’t think I had ever seen until last night.  The timing was certainly appropriate.  Nolte has a line in the movie that talks about how all life on or near the ocean is governed by the endless motion of the tide. 

Its absolutely true and I am endlessly fascinated by the constant motion and the immense, unimaginably immense, power of the moving water.

In this pair the angle of the ramp is the giveaway.  Its a rule of provisioning that, when you return to the boat with a truck full of provisions, its always low tide.

In this pair its the pilings that tell the level.  As we approach a new dock often the height of the pilings is the easiest visual clue as to tide levels although the waterline along the shore is usually pretty obvious as well.

The old hotel has water almost up to the veranda at high tide and a huge expanse of beach at low.

The sheer volume of water that has to move every day is hard to imagine.  Before we started spending time out here I thought there was just a high and a low every day but now I know that there’s more or less two highs and two lows in every 25 hours.  Sometimes the higher low and the lower high blend together and it kind of looks like only one high and low per day but if you look close there’s still 2 complete cycles.  Right now we’ve got two very distinct highs and two equally obvious lows.  That also means that we have relatively strong currents which change direction 4 times in 24 hours. 

Today we’ll stay tied to the dock at Port Neville until 2:00 PM in order to catch a favourable current eastward in Johnstone Strait.  The current timing for an eastbound passage is about as bad as it can get right now.  In another week it will be possible to leave early in the morning and ride a flood tide east but right now that flood runs out just before daylight.  If we left early this morning we’d be buying a lot of fuel to fight the outgoing current.