Boating and Sailing.pdf - Moja ladja

Mastering the Tides
In This Chapter
◆ What causes tides?
◆ How tides affect boating
◆ Understanding tide tables
◆ The effect of wind on tides
16
Chapter
Tides are marvelous. They can make rivers run backward 100 miles from the sea.
They have the power to lift 500-ton ships off sandbars … and to push them right
up through reinforced concrete bridges!
Like time itself, they wait for no man … or woman.
Tides can also be miserable. I don’t think I’m that paranoid, but it seems like the
tides are always against me. Especially when I’m in a canoe or sailboat.
Traveling on the right tide can make you look like a hero, but leaving the docks
on the wrong flow can make trouble for the most skilled skipper. So every boater
who cruises coastal waters needs to know how they work.
The daily coming and going of the ocean’s visits to land is controlled by the gravitational
pull of the sun and the moon, centrifugal force, and the rotation of the
earth, as most of us learned in high school science. Okay, so maybe we didn’t