Tide tables

It's 08:00 Sunday morning and, already, it's a scorcher ... must be 30 degrees outside. We've got all of the windows open so we're getting a cooling breeze flowing through the apartment -- from the peaks behind us (where the dragon lives) -- down to the sea.

Anyway, we were woken by a series of airhorns ... there's some kind of ironman competition happening on the beach below us ... quite a spectacle from our vantage point as you don't really get to see the individuals participating ... just a collective mass of e.g. white water trails in the sea.

The sea ... currently it's @ maximum low tide. Watching the in & out of the sea everyday is very compelling -- fascinating watching the tides. My in-laws had amazing perspicacity in that they bought me a tide clock for my birthday (which archie dismantled and re-programmed but luckily I have got it all back together again).

The clock is unfailingly accurate. But I don't get it. According to the Hong Kong tide table site in HK, the tides oscillate a bit in frequency; duration and height. So how can an analogue clock - with no facility to set the day of the month etc, account for these variances? I don't know!

Have been trying to read up on how and why tides work .... but it remains a mystery. I'll persevere!

I'm feeling a bit stone age man about it all ... I'd not really considered how tides work before. I assumed full moon, or closeness of the moon = high tide ... allow for some local nuances. According to wiki, it's all a bit more complicated than that - e.g. high tide in the Southern Oceans occurs some two days before the North Sea. Fantastic.

I bet the nautical amongst you are thinking 'bloody idiot'. I remember once a mate of mine (Al Comrie) casually reciting next day's tide tables -- at the time I was immediately impressed, then realised he was making it up (a la Crocodile Dundee 'reading the time from the sun' scene), but in retrospect I have a sneaking suspicion that he actually knew what he was talking about (makes a change eh AL?).

M