Entries tagged "tide"
2010-09-07
BBC Devon have a delightful story about the sculptor, Marcus Vergette, on their section of the BBC website.Marcus is sculpting a series of 'tidal bells' that will ring out at high tide around the country. There is no mention of springs or neaps in the article, so I'm presuming the bells are being placed low enough to ring at a neap tide (the narrowest range between high and low).In the book I touch on the fact that humans have become very adept at approximating tidal behaviour, but it is still impossible to predict tidal times or heights…
2010-06-04
Back from a short family camping trip to the Isle of Wight, where I stumbled across this wonderful sign on the side of an old lifeboat station house.In case it is not legible in the picture, the words read as follows:When full or newYou see the Moon,The tides far out in the afternoon.But when the Moon'sAt either quarter,At tea the beachIs underwater.Six hours the waterebbs away,An hour laterEvery day.Get down to the beachAs soon as you canTime and TideWait for no man.------How divine is that?
2009-12-05
A tiny piece about 'Les Ecrehous' islands, that I had written for the Guardian ages ago, featured in it last Saturday. Here it is:This year I was lucky enough to spend some time on a place called Les Écréhous. It is a place you spend time on, not in. Five miles northeast of Jersey, these three tiny islands stand precariously above the water at high tide, surrounded by rocks that have claimed countless lives in the past. When the tide recedes the dots in the sea join up, forming the most rugged landscape of sharp dark shapes, broken only…
2009-06-29
We spent the weekend on Alderney. We went there to muck about on the beaches and we were not disappointed. The water is still fresh at this time of year, but I cannot think of an island with better beaches.This is a photo taken looking out to the Fort from Longis Beach on the southeastern part of the island. Alderney is famous for its powerful tides and you can see how churned up the water is getting on the left halft of the picture, as it races across the causeway.
2008-08-26
Time and navigation have a cosy relationship, as John Harrison, inventor of the chronometer that cracked the longitude problem in the 18th Century would attest. The sun, earth, moon and planets and stars have at times been seen as cogs in a huge clock.
So many natural phenomena take their orders from these bodies and tide is one of the best known of these. I took this photo of the tide running past a cardinal off Jersey this weekend. The cardinal is an easterly one, signalling that the safer water lay to the east of…
