Tides and Such

Another hot day.  If I was on a canoe trip, I'd be up and paddling before dawn and then napping during the afternoon heat.  As it is, this is another short day trip as I work over the waters that are closest to our house.  There's not much sense in an hour drive to get in a 2 hour paddle.

I head down to the Wheeler Marsh again.Today, the tide is a bit more interesting than normal.  If you're not familiar with tides, you basically have two cycles per day ie, low, high, low and high.  The timing between a low and high is a usually somewhere between six and a quarter and six and a half hours.  So, the next day's lows and highs will be about one hour later than today.  Besides the timing, tides also vary in height depending on the moon. Here, a maximum high tide is 8.5 feet with the minimum low tide being -1.3 ft. This morning's high tide is only 6 feet with a low tide of -.7 feet and this has a couple of effects.  One, the slack tide at the high or low (slack meaning little current) lasts longer.  And two, the tidal currents, which are highest halfway between low and high tides, are less.  On top of that, tides are affected by geography such as constrictions in the river or in this case, a big marsh crisscrossed by dozens of channels.

I get down to the marsh in about fifteen minutes on a very light current - not so much a tide current as it is the natural river current.  The water in the marsh is not flowing at all, it is dead still.  I head up into the secret shortcut and then meander through the middle.  It is surprisingly quiet as far as birds go.  I spot a couple Yellow-Crowned Night Herons, a couple Great Egrets, just one flock of Sandpipers and a few Osprey, which are hard to miss as they are perched on their nests. When I get up near Milford Point, I head counter clockwise around the outer edge of the marsh.  Spot a shaggy white tail deer fawn at the Refuge launch.  Now, an hour after high tide, the current is barely noticeable and then only by checking the lean of submerged swamp grass.  As to tides and marshes, they don't drain upriver/downriver.  Marshes are reservoirs and they fill and drain by a rule of least resistance... the water direction is in or out of the marsh by the easiest path, which may not be what the open water of the river is doing.  It's not that big of a deal, unless you are trying to navigate by reading the current... or you run out of water before finding your way out.

As I leave the marsh and head back upriver, it seems that the Herons have arrived for breakfast.  I spot a dozen Yellow-Crowned Night Herons in the last 200 yards.  One is a juvenile.