WATCH: For the second day in a row, shores across the Island got hit with significantly low tides. But did we beat any records? Isabelle Raghem reports.
Getting boats out of the water and onto Sidney’s Tulista Park ramp was an impossible task on Friday afternoon.
“The tides out and we can’t get the truck in,” said one boater.
The lowest tide in Sidney was shortly after noon.
“We’re seeing some really low tides yesterday, today and tomorrow,” says Denny Sinnott, supervisor with Tides, Current and Water Levels, Canadian Hydrographic Service-Pacific Region.
The researcher with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, says it’s a phenomenon we’re seeing up and down our coast.
“We’re in a new moon situation and in that situation the moon and the sun are in line with each. It’s sorta like an egg shape around the earth so you’ll get a bulge where the sun and the moon are, a bulge on the other side then you get flattening spots.”
It’s also happening at the same time as two other cycles: the moon is at it’s closest to earth and the moon is on its highest northern orbit. Both of the occurences the gravitational pull.
McNeill Bay in Oak Bay had its lowest tide around eleven, revealing the ocean floor.
Victoria’s lowest tide Friday hit -0.1 metres below the relative mean sea level, compared to – 0.03 Thursday. It was the lowest tide of the year but not of the decade. That low tide happened in 2008, when it hit -0.3 metres. The record for the lowest tide was recorded on June 1, 1957 at -0.4 metres.
Isabelle Raghem
