tides, currents, and leeway 103
HOW TO USE ONLINE NOAA TIDE TABLES
NOAA off ers free online tide and current tables for selected locations through-
out the world. Let’s look at one example. Let’s say you were planning to stay in
Charleston, South Carolina, on Saturday, September 20, 2008.
- Access the NOAA site at http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/tides08/.
- Scroll down the list of states. Click on South Carolina.
- Click on Charleston Harbor.
- Click on Predictions, adjacent to CHARLESTON (Customhouse
Wharf ). - Click on the option for a printable version (at the top of the page).
- Scroll to the September page and highlight the information for
September 20. Right click on your mouse, then click to copy. - Go to any word processing program, such as MS Word. Open up a new
page. Click on File, Page Setup, Landscape, and click OK. Right click
your mouse and click on Paste. Print the page.
Note: the NOAA website automatically corrects the times of tides to Daylight
Savings Time (DST) when applicable. At the bottom of each month, NOAA
refers to this as Local Daylight Time (LDT).
We’ll make an easy-to-use graph for our trip and tape it onto a cockpit navi-
gation clipboard to show the expected tides, based on the information below:
September – Charleston
Date Time Height Time Height Time Height
09/20/2008 0600 0.1L 1220 6.3H 1853 0.9L
A minus sign before a height would indicate a tide below the charted depth.
In our example, all tides for this day are above (added to) the charted depth.Th is graph represents the Charleston Harbor tides for September 20, 2008.