flotsam
A warm and sunny Sunday, so we went to Richmond Beach Park and happened to find a particularly high high tide. The waves were washing various bits of driftwood and flotsam around. The beach (more rocky than sandy) is littered with driftwood, but the waves usually don't come high enough to start moving them around much. Even this high tide was only doing a bit of flotsam arranging. Puget Sound was pretty calm and the waves small, and the really big driftwood logs on the upper beach would take a major storm to move around. Still it was cool to see this high tide -- an interesting contrast with the low low tides I've happened upon recently. I ought to look up and print out tide information so I know when the more extreme tides will be happening.
I just checked the tide info online and it looks like we were at the beach at the peak of the high tide, which was +11 feet. I'm not exactly sure what the average high tide is around here, but I think it is quite a bit less than that. (later note: I tried to find out if this was an unusually high tide or not, but got lost in tidal terminology and differing datums -- mean high water MHW, mean high high water MHHW, mean low water MLW, mean low low water MLLW, mean this, mean that. It appears, I think, that this high tide was not unusually high for a "high high tide" (which occur about once a day when the moon is right). Also, I thought +11 feet seemed like a lot, but I assumed it meant +11 from "sea level", but apparently they measure from "mean low low water", which explains why the tide tables almost always give positive values for both high and low tide.)
Being a nice weekend afternoon, there were lots of people at the beach here. I watched a group of three young teen kids dare each other to go into the water. Two of them did wade in and do quick dives underwater before running out and shrieking about how cold it was as if they were in great pain. Then they would dare each other again and do back in for another reluctant-but-playful soaking and another shrieking run back to towels and a little fire they had going. The temperature of Puget Sound's coastal water is currently about 47 F (8 C).
flotsam
A warm and sunny Sunday, so we went to Richmond Beach Park and happened to find a particularly high high tide. The waves were washing various bits of driftwood and flotsam around. The beach (more rocky than sandy) is littered with driftwood, but the waves usually don't come high enough to start moving them around much. Even this high tide was only doing a bit of flotsam arranging. Puget Sound was pretty calm and the waves small, and the really big driftwood logs on the upper beach would take a major storm to move around. Still it was cool to see this high tide -- an interesting contrast with the low low tides I've happened upon recently. I ought to look up and print out tide information so I know when the more extreme tides will be happening.
I just checked the tide info online and it looks like we were at the beach at the peak of the high tide, which was +11 feet. I'm not exactly sure what the average high tide is around here, but I think it is quite a bit less than that. (later note: I tried to find out if this was an unusually high tide or not, but got lost in tidal terminology and differing datums -- mean high water MHW, mean high high water MHHW, mean low water MLW, mean low low water MLLW, mean this, mean that. It appears, I think, that this high tide was not unusually high for a "high high tide" (which occur about once a day when the moon is right). Also, I thought +11 feet seemed like a lot, but I assumed it meant +11 from "sea level", but apparently they measure from "mean low low water", which explains why the tide tables almost always give positive values for both high and low tide.)
Being a nice weekend afternoon, there were lots of people at the beach here. I watched a group of three young teen kids dare each other to go into the water. Two of them did wade in and do quick dives underwater before running out and shrieking about how cold it was as if they were in great pain. Then they would dare each other again and do back in for another reluctant-but-playful soaking and another shrieking run back to towels and a little fire they had going. The temperature of Puget Sound's coastal water is currently about 47 F (8 C).