76: Tide vs Current: Why You're Fishing at the Wrong Time

Number one, tide and current are not the same thing.

And I want to help you separate this inside of your head.

tide is vertical it's water going up and water coming down current is horizontal it's when the water comes in causing it to go up and the water goes out causing it to come down so those two things are not the same although they absolutely interact with each other and noah puts it simply the vertical motion of the tides near the shore causes the water to move horizontally and and that is what is creating the currents.

So the tide is causing the currents, but they're very different measurements and two very different things to your fishing process.

Now, a quick vocabulary thing here, if you are hanging around any of the fishing community, you may have heard people say, oh, a flood spot and an ebb spot.

And if you're new, you might not know exactly what that means.

A flood means the tidal current is moving in and the tide is going up vertically.

And ebb means the current is going out and the tide is going out vertically as well.

So here's the part that actually changes how you plan.

This is gonna be the biggest, most useful thing inside of this episode, so make sure you stay with me.

Max current doesn't happen at high tide or low tide.

According to NOAA, and if you watch some tidal charts, which I'm going to show you some apps as well, the strongest flood and ebb currents happen before or near the time of high and low time, but not exactly at them.

So sit with that for a second because I want you to think about what that actually means.

If you've been pulling up a tide table or looking at one of the tidal apps that you can get on your phone, And planning your day around tide change, which is exactly what I did when I started fishing.

Oh, tide change is at this time, so that means I need to fish during this window.

And you'll hear that in a lot of different marketing or fishing gurus as they explain it.

If you've been pulling up a tide table and looking at when high tide hits and planning your day specifically around that, You're actually planning around the wrong instrument.

The tide table tells you how high the water is.

It does not reliably tell you what the water is doing from a moving standpoint and when it's moving hardest and when it's sitting still.

And those two moments are going to tell you what is happening to the bait that swims in that water and therefore the fish that are targeting that bait.

slack water is what you actually want so noah describes slack water as a period of no velocity in which the current turns around so as it's coming in it slows down it pauses and it reverses and goes out but as it does that reverse there's almost that moment of no velocity before the switch actually happens and high tide is not the same thing as slack tide and that's something that i want you to understand as you go into your planning process in the future But those two things can be very far enough apart that if you plan on the wrong one, tide instead of current, you'll show up at the exact wrong time entirely.

And the other thing that's interesting is it's different everywhere.

Slack tide and Slack current can vary depending on the location and the tidal station that you're looking at an exact moment.

It's not happening at the same time all over the San Juan Islands as an example.

So NOAA notes that the shape of the coastline and the bottom topography, the local water depth, can all change the speed, direction, and timing of the current.