Best Tide for Surfing: A Practical Guide

Ask ten surfers what the best tide for surfing is and you will get ten answers, because the honest one is "it depends on the break". But the tide is not random. It changes the depth of water over the sand or reef, it changes how fast the water is moving, and it changes how safe the line-up is. Once you understand those three effects, you can read any tide chart and make a good call before you paddle out.

Why the Tide Changes the Waves

Waves break when they reach water roughly 1.3 times as deep as they are tall. Move the water level up or down by a metre or two and the same swell breaks on a different part of the seabed, at a different angle, with a different shape. Three things follow from that:

• Depth over the bank or reef, together with its shape and the swell hitting it, decides whether a wave peels, dumps, or does not break at all.
• Water level during the flood and ebb changes how the swell breaks over the bar, and with it the strength of the rip currents that breaking waves set up.
• Exposure at low water turns a friendly reef into a hazard and can drain the water off a beach break entirely.

Beach Breaks: Mid Tide Is the Usual Starting Point

Beach breaks work on sandbars. The bars shift over weeks and months, but on any given day they sit at a fixed depth, and the tide decides how much water covers them. At low tide there is often too little water over the bar: waves jack up quickly and close out or dump onto the sand. At high tide there can be too much water: the swell rolls over the bar without breaking and dumps as a fat shorebreak, sometimes with backwash off the beach or a seawall. Mid tide, roughly two hours either side of the halfway point, is where many beach breaks find their shape. Treat that as a starting point rather than a rule, because every bank has its own window. Cornwall's north coast, the beaches around Newquay for example, is a textbook case: a spring range of around six metres means the same beach can be perfect at 10am and unrecognisable by lunchtime.

Not every beach follows the rule. The steep banks of France's south-west, around Biarritz and the Landes beaches to the north, are famous for hollow waves at lower tides, when the water draws off the bank and the barrel stands up. That is why the honest answer is always "check the local knowledge", then use the chart to time your session.

Reef and Point Breaks: The Reef Sets the Rules

A reef does not move, so each reef break has a tide window written into its shape. Shallow reefs need enough water to be surfable at all and become dangerous as the tide drains. Deeper reefs and points can handle low water and often get hollower as it drops. Bali is a good illustration of both: the tide gauge at Benoa shows a range of two to three metres, enough for some Bukit reefs to work only around mid to high water while others come alive at low. In the Philippines, the reef at Cloud 9 on Siargao has its own window, and the same goes for the points of Raglan in New Zealand or Jeffreys Bay in South Africa.

Two rules reduce the risk on reef:

• If you do not know the break, arrive on a rising tide. A mistake in your timing then means more water over the reef, not less. It does not make the session safe on its own: confirm the break's tide window, the currents and your exit before you paddle out.
• On spring tides the low is lower than usual. A reef that was fine at low tide last week may be exposed this week. See our guide to spring and neap tides for why.

Incoming vs Outgoing Tide

Many surfers prefer the incoming (flood) tide, and it is a reasonable default. At a lot of breaks the depth over the bank improves as the water comes in, and if you arrive early the good window is still ahead of you rather than behind. It is a heuristic, though: how the flood current interacts with the swell is specific to the break, and some spots are at their best on the drop. The outgoing (ebb) tide is not bad in itself, but it comes with two warnings. Beach rips are driven by breaking waves rather than by the tide, but near river mouths, estuaries and harbour entrances the ebb adds a separate current of its own, flowing out to sea. And the water is draining off whatever you are surfing over. If you surf near a river entrance or a sound, say the beaches beside the Seaway at Southport on the Gold Coast or the beaches around Tofino where Clayoquot Sound drains past the town, treat the whole ebb with respect and check local current warnings. The height chart tells you when the level is falling, not when the entrance current peaks.

How Much Does the Tide Matter Where You Surf?

The first clue is the tidal range, the vertical distance between high and low water. It varies enormously around the world:

• Small range, under a metre: Hawaii is the classic example. Check Haleiwa or Waimea Bay on the North Shore and the tide barely moves. Swell size, direction and wind matter far more than tide, though even half a metre changes a shallow reef like Pipeline.
• Medium range, one to four metres: Portugal's Ericeira, Peniche and Nazaré, Australia's east coast around Byron Bay, California's Santa Cruz, Morocco's Taghazout. Tide clearly shapes the session, and a shallow reef can still switch off with a small change, but at most breaks it will not end the day.
• Large range, over four metres on spring tides: the Atlantic coasts of Britain, Ireland and France, and parts of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Here the tide is one of the first things you check, alongside the swell.

Reading the Tide Chart Before You Go

Open the station page for your break and look at three things on the chart. The height of the curve right now tells you the water level against the chart datum; once you know roughly what level a bank or reef starts working at, it tells you how much water is over it. The slope of the curve tells you how fast the level is changing. For a regular six-hour rise or fall, the sailor's rule of twelfths says the level moves by one, two, three, three, two and one twelfths of the range in each hour, so it changes fastest in the middle two hours and slowest near high and low water. Where the tide is irregular or mixed, trust the actual curve instead. Either way, a break that is "on" at mid tide on a big spring tide might only hold for an hour. The spring or neap indicator tells you whether this week's lows will be extreme. If you are new to the chart, our guide to how to read a tide chart covers all of this in more detail.

Planning a trip? The 15-day forecast on every station page lets you line up the swell forecast with the tide window before you book. If the tide is high at dawn for the whole week you are there, you will want to know that before you arrive.

A Simple Checklist

1. Find out what tide the break works on. Ask locals, read guidebooks, watch it for a day.
2. Check the tidal range for the location. Small range, worry less. Large range, plan around it.
3. Prefer a rising tide when you are unsure, especially over reef.
4. Watch for spring tides. Lower lows, higher highs, stronger currents.
5. As a starting point, aim for the middle of the rise, then adjust once you know the break.

The tide will never be the whole story in surfing. But it is the one variable you can predict weeks ahead, give or take what the weather does to it on the day, so it is the one you should never leave to chance.