Whether you’re a coastal hiker, a fisherman or a boater, it’s important to know how to read a tide table to have a safe navigation and journey at sea. Understanding tide heights and when high or low tides occur can help you decide the best time to take out your Stacer Wildrider boat to explore tide pools, dig for clams, or anchor your boat and beach comb for pretty shells. Knowing how to read tide tables can also help keep track of time. If you’re backpacking on the coast, for example, you need to have a tide table, along with a map to know what time of day you can safely round a headland that can’t be passed at certain tide levels.

What is a Tide Table?

A tide table shows the daily predictions for the local time of low and high tides and the height of those tides for a particular coastal area. The tide table is often shown in a tabular format. Note that tide tables are different from tide charts, which typically refer to a series of maps that show hourly water levels throughout a bay or estuary.

How to Read a Tide Table

Look Up Daily Tide Information for Your Location

There are different ways to get information about daily tides for your particular area or location.

You can get free tide information from the Bureau of Meteorology website under the Tide Predictions page. It encompasses all the tide predictions in Australia, South Pacific, and even Antarctica. You can simply browse through the map to pin your location and it will show when the high tide and low tide will occur during the day.

You can also obtain a tide table booklet for your specific area. These are often available at marine shops, hardware stores, marinas, or sporting goods stores. You can also look for tide tables in your local newspapers. You can find them printed beside the weather reports. If you prefer the techy side of things, you can download tide table apps on your mobile phone. They can be found in Google Play Stores or Apple App Stores.

The tide table information can be viewed in different formats, such as a graph or table. It shows the name of the place, the high tide and low tide information, and the hours when these tides occur.

Look Up the Dates You’ll Be Going to the Sea

Once you find the location of interest, you’ll want to look up the tides for the dates you’ll be out in the water. For example, let’s say you wanted to go to the ocean to fish for salmon in your fishing boat on a balmy day in February, a tide table is useful to figure out the best time for fishing. You may also want to know whether you can hike or camp along the beach or whether you can pass a rocky point at certain times of the day.

Make a Note of the Times of High and Low Tides

Before you look at the high and low tides, you have to understand what these terms actually mean. The chart datum is the average of low tide heights for the area, not the ocean floor, and it is set low so that tides don’t dip below it. Make a note of the times and heights of high tides and low tides, and the height difference in between. Remember that a high tide is predicted as how high above the chart datum the tide will be at its biggest swell. It’s indicated as a positive number and may be preceded by a plus sign. For example, a high tide of ten feet (3 metres) means the tide will be ten feet higher than the average low water mark. Be aware that high tides may occur twice a day.

Low tide predicts the water level at its lowest point; because chart datum is an average, low tide can fall below this number in which case this will be indicated as a negative number, otherwise, it will just be indicated as a small number. Again, this may occur twice in one day and refers to the height of the tide in feet or meters about chart datum.

For example, a tide table shows the high tide hour in Sydney. It also shows how high or low the tide is going to be. It is usually measured in meters. Viewing the information in graph form gives you a sense of the time of the rise and fall of water. If you’ll be out in the water for a long time or you’re planning to surf or swim in the ocean, don’t forget to check a tide table that indicates the wave height and interval, along with checking the weather as well.