I’ve got a skiff on a slip in a tight marina, and when the ebb fully hits it’s all rocks and rip-rap underneath the boat. This is especially true in the extreme negative tides of the new and full moon. Unlike the east coast which has fairly equal tides, here it’s one high high and one low low, with one lower high, and one higher low each day. Mixed diurnal. A range about fifteen feet, with maximal ebb three feet below nominal sea level. So getting in and out, timing is everything, conditions and weather notwithstanding.
But I’m not just watching the water in port. My ongoing study, more practical than academic, how water and currents move. Specifically, about twenty billion gallons. Today was breathless calm, perfect for feeling the tide. I snuck out at daybreak in the peak of ebbing, a few hours before slack, all that liquid mass rushing out to sea. Drifting with this, I was pulled seaward around 2.5 miles an hour. Do nothing- row, sail, or motor- and I’d be gone in no time.
As much as I’m doing this to ‘get away’ there’s really no escape from the vicious vicissitudes of our worldly predicament. Tide cycles are tempting to use as a template for comparisons. Democracy and Fascism, Peace and War, Abundance and Hunger, Tolerance and Hate… Are mass movements that come and go mappable as the daily chart by which I can choose my ideal window for action? Do populations and constituencies get pulled by cosmic forces, energies both periodic and irresistible?
Everyone’s heard the saying, “A Rising Tide lifts all boats.” Rarely do we think of that as water moving in, inundating the land, flooding as an effect of moon’s gravity. What is one boat against all that? The currents of history. What can we do but ‘Go with the Flow’. However, the essential point of seamanship is that a lot can be accomplished with correct calculations, accommodating for variance. If your craft is in good shape and has the means, with enough skill it’s possible for a lone navigator or crew to go in a direction against or obliquely to the prevailing drift.
If, that is, you can get off the dock and underway.
wake
Things are swinging so fast these days it is all out on a tidal schedule.
I was once out on a 50ft something or other and the captain got us stuck because he wasn’t watching the tides in a semi-shallow harbor. We had to sit and wait for them to shift and float us again.
…
There is also the issue of wake! The artificial waves caused by something disturbing the natural flow. I can recall being bounced and battered in a small motorboat on the Niagara river as a parade of large motorboats passed by. Huge wakes. We were tossed and turned like Gilligan. The Skipper, too. Ouch!
The wake of an unexpected craft can require a quick decision and rapid change of course.
Take ‘em Head on
Or at a slight angle. Might be a wet roller coaster ride, but better than chancing getting rolled over by a beam hit.
It’s one of the more obnoxious hazards out there….the speed freaks, show offs, and oblivious wake makers in otherwise tranquil water
Public safety alert
Recalling this debacle borne of reckless behavior
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/boats-keep-sinking-and-capsizing-at-the-trump-boat-parades.html
Jetskis and Speedboats and Jerks
Many times over the years I’ve seen idiots joyriding on the CT River. A good friend’s son was critically injured in a speeding boat accident years ago. The carelessness of some boaters is unreal.
Vico's Late Third Age
There are the special cases, too. Perhaps a location where there are competing waves/tides? Things pulling and pushing from multiple directions? It could be the shape of the shore, or something unknown below.
I always liked the illusions, too. Water receding as another layer pushes forward. And if you stand still in the wet sand as it rushes out you feel like you are moving, but are in one place.
** Everyone knows that you just jump in a boat and drive it anyway you want. Go! It’s fun, like a big jet ski! Wheeeee! (Car or truck? Take lessons, get a student license, get insurance, pass tests, get a real license, etc.)
“Vico don’t surf…”
In David Attenborough’s new series on mammals, an overriding theme is there’s no part of the earth in which man has not mangled the natural order. Every species has to fend and adapt anew as a result of our sprawl and presumption of dominion. Even though we’re a small force in terms of numbers and mass in comparison, everything else has had to yield.
On the water, there is actually a very detailed and prescribed pecking order, who has the right of way, and who must yield, which type of craft, and what conditions determine the stand-on, or give way rules. In actual fact it feels pretty lawless out there, and more often than is comfortable, the law plays out as ‘the bigger boat has the right of way’.
Like life in society, this mindset makes for confusion, not only because you never know if an oncoming boater knows the rules, but also if they feel like obeying them. So, in the model of decay and man’s descent into chaos as Vico described, whether social forces are ordered and cyclical, even if local and unfamiliar, the question becomes moot when all bets are off.