Gaspe Tides

[spider]

When I'm up here Parc Forillion is a couple of hours away. So in Sept I looked up the tides for the Gaspe station (from the Canadian Hydrographic Service) wrote them down and off we went.

We knew the tides were small during the days we wanted to visit Sept 24-26. Knowing the tides helps us know if the seals will be sunning on the rocks or more apt to be in the water, plus ,of course any ride from the tides is always a help.

But my times were off.

The tides listed by the Parc were different (they take them from Pointe-St -Pierre opposite the tip of Forillion.

but the times were off seemingly randomly...high tide was off 1:48 min

low tide off 47 min

next day high tide was off 58 min and the next day high tide was off only 13 min.

Any ideas why ??

(I have half an idea from a web site from a man named Zollitsch who has travelled many a mile up through here but still haven't got a good handle on it, and can see he was also confused when he travelled through here)

I could understand how my times could be off if they were uniformly off, but the wild swings in time confuse the heck out of me.

Any help out there??

Also when I read my tides it reads... Eastern Daylight Time (+ 4hrs)...what is the +4hrs referring to??

thanks for any help

[jdkilroy]

Spider said: "Also when I read my tides it reads... Eastern Daylight Time (+ 4hrs)...what is the +4hrs referring to??"

The "+4" is referring to the time difference between GMT (or UTC as its called now) and the time zone of that reference station.

I don't have the table that you are using but is it possible that the time correction for the location you were at was not applied to the reference station times. Were the heights of tide way off as well? just a thought.

[spider]

Darn good question, so I went back over my info and figured the height of the tides was pretty acurate.

In real life we were surprised that we almost ran out of water, because the tide heights were only about 3 ft.

It was a good education for us as we saw 3 Blue Whales last year from the same area and now we realise what a confined channel they must have been swimming in. I would think the danger level would be pretty huge if they missed judged their location.

Now that I think of it we launched from Cap-aux- Os . (Cape of Bones) which to my understanding was a natural place where whale bones washed up. But thinking it through it may well have been a place where Whales got stranded.

The swing in tide times I find confusing. If I were in my home waters of Great Bay Nh I can count on Exeter high tide being about 2 1/2 hrs later than Portsmouth.

Water is already well ebbing while Exeter"s is still rising...but at least that is a steady constant from one tide to the next....

[Tom Tieman]

Look at the tide table in graphic mode. The tide cycle is uneven, with very large differences between the morning tide and evening tide. And, the pattern was about to change to more sinusoidal tides. That may be part of the answer, I'd love to know the rest.

[spider]

Yes, I'm just now starting to get a grasp of what the graphs are trying to tell me about whats going on.

Also tryig to get the most out of the "informations" that they have.

That is the site I go to most often, but I can only get 7 day tides at a time.

Anywhere I can get the months tides for up there.

Much like the Maine Harbors site for down around here ??

[Tom Tieman]

...Anywhere I can get the months tides for up there. ...

Try Xtides.

[spider]

Thanks, nice site...that will keep me busy for awhile.

Hadn't seen that one before...