Here’s another wintry San Diego pleasure: it’s the time to enjoy extreme low tides.
The local shoreline of course experiences low tides (usually two) every day. But the lows only get remarkably low when the moon lines up with the sun and Earth — something that occurs twice-monthly (during the moon’s full and new phases). During the winter and summer months, the Earth’s angle of inclination further influences how close we are to the adjoining heavenly bodies, and the lowest tides experience their greatest extremes.
The influence of the Earth’s tilt also explains why our winter extreme lows always occur in the afternoon, while the summer ones almost invariably come at or before dawn. This means winter is when it’s most practical to take advantage of the pleasures the extreme low tides make possible.
One is tidepooling, exploring the shallow rocky pools that serve as home to a host of marine creatures: hermit and other crabs, starfish, octopi, anemones, sea urchins, jellyfish, and a host of mollusks. For a list of good tidepooling locations, see http://www.sdnhm.org/fieldguide/places/tidepooling.html.
Low tide looking north from PB Point
Extreme low tides also provide access to some normally inaccessible places. Chief among them are the half-dozen grottoes the waves have sculpted out of the sandstone base of Soledad Mountain, just west of La Jolla Shores Beach. On more than a dozen afternoons between now and the end of February, it will be possible to walk into them and enjoy the earthy smells, eerie noises, and riveting interplay of shadows and seawater on foot, as opposed to from instead a sea kayak. To explore these caves, start from the Shores parking lot about 40 minutes before the predicted low point and head southwest. (Beware that winds and other meteorological conditions can alter the predicted lows and highs.)
For the lowest lows (also a great time for hiking or bicycling along local beaches), mark these dates on your calendar: Friday, December 12 (about 3:13 p.m.) and Saturday, December 13 (4 p.m.); Thursday through Sunday, January 8-11 (starting at 1:36 p.m., and about 40 minutes later each day); Friday through Monday, February 6-9 (again starting about 1:25 p.m. on Friday). The most extreme among them is predicted to be Saturday, January 10, when the waterline should be more than 2 feet below the mean low tide line a few minutes after 3 p.m.
