Tide Planning Application for Iphone/Ipad/Ipod – £2.99 / Free version with limited functionality
Good Bits:
- Handy sliders allow you to set the tide height for your favorite beach and see exactly when you can board or buggy.
- Extended tidal information for France.
Bad Bits:
- Most information available for free elsewhere, just not as convenient.
- You might have to purchase additional licenses to see UK extended tide times.
I bought this app when planning a buggying trip to France, as I was unable to find tide times for France for dates more than a few days ahead. In the UK, you can easily find all this info for free although not all in one convenient place. Windguru will give you the times for a month or so in advance (in local time as opposed to GMT), but only shows the graph for the current day or so. The BBC weather site will let you see any date with the graph, but the times are in GMT which must be translated to local time in different ways at different times of the year. That’s too hard for my little brain.
Even though it cost a few quid, this app does everything better than all the free stuff, and has some handy tools that make it really easy to tell when a beach is usable for buggying or boarding. You can specify in the options whether you would like the time listed in GMT or matching you device’s time settings.
First, you look at a Google-like map to pick the tide station closest to your beach. There was a wide selection for England and France as you can see from this screenshot. Each of those little white dots can be picked and saved as a favorite.
The next step is to pick a date, as the screenshot shows.
You might also notice that the app seems to be asking for more money to enable looking at tides more than a week away. I’m not sure what’s up with that, I’ve already paid for it. That limitation doesn’t exist for France, you can look up any date.
Then you get your tide chart, as shown below.
You can see the tides for the whole day as well as sunrise and sunset. There is also a bar you can drag, that I have put at 6 meters representing the level that the beach is exposed at Greatstone. The red bits are the times that the tide is below the bar and the beach is exposed, but not necessarily dry. The little sailboat icon can be dragged along the sine wave and shows you the exact time. In the above picture, I’ve put it exactly where the water reaches 6 meters, so I can see that it will happen at 11:35. That should mean that I can buggy until 11:35, probably a little less as the water will come up fast!
You can also see a textual view like this:
I did notice the application is missing coefficients, which would be nice to have for Les Hemmes.
Author : Jim O’Hara
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Nice one Jim… looks great on the iPad.
Have you looked up Les-Hemmes, the ipod/iphone version does include ceoffs on the chart screen for certain beaches.