During my recent voyage to Friday Harbor, it seemed to me that I needed a tide table several times a day, during various discussions and, of course, while underway. It’s no problem underway…I keep a little tide book at the helm.
But once I was out of the boat, talking with other skippers or planning a passage over lunch, I missed that little tide book. I don’t dare remove it from the boat, though…there’s just too much chance it won’t get back.
If only I had tide tables on my phone…
I decided to ask maritime electronics geek Ben Ellison (Panbo) where I could find tide predictions optimized for display on mobile devices. He referred me to ActiveCaptain‘s Jeff Siegel, who, it turns out, knows a lot about this! Here’s what Jeff told me:
There are a variety of ways to do this. Most usually, I prefer tides to be calculated on the mobile device itself. I’d hate to be in some nice anchorage somewhere, away from everything, and not be able to get a good tide estimate because I couldn’t get online.
For Palm, there’s Tide Tool—an exceptional and free application. I’ve helped on the development of bug fixes, but I used it for 5 years before I got involved with that.
For Windows Mobile, there’s cTide. It’s very good and also free—it’s a little slower than Tide Tool, but who cares if it takes an extra couple of seconds?
Both of these are based on an open source tide predictor called xTide.
There are a variety of servers using xTide to serve tide pages online. One of the most used is http://tbone.biol.sc.edu/tide/index.html. This site allows for many options for the size of the graphics—almost too many options. In an emergency, it’s something to fall back on, though. I just tried some displays on my phone and it was usable, but not great. I still always use the native apps first though.
Thanks, Jeff! I’ll see what I can figure out for my T-Mobile Shadow.
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I installed Tide Tool on my Palm several years ago mostly more for the novelty of having a Tide Table (they are actually “predictions”) instantly available for the esoteric conversations that arise wherever I go (my son has a good role model). However, I soon found out how handy having the data actually was. I am a beachcomber, and have been lucky to explore a many beaches in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California. Who carries little books for each area, or wants to bother to obtain one? The graphing detail will occupy one’s mind during a boring wait as will comparing minutes of increasing daylight between different latitudes.
Updates need to occassionally be downloaded, for instance, when our government alters our calendar system, but on my very basic device there has been no problem. I have transfered the program to different Palm devices 3 times with no difficulty. The only problem with obtaining data is that the Canadian government still does not release their information except through their own publications.
Any Java apps for those of us without a Palm or WinMo phone?
Thanks for saying this in such an eloquent and approachable way,lucy
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