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Coastal Tide PlannerWhen can I get out and get back?

Pick your days — not your way through a tide table

⚠ Planning aid only — not for navigation. Read why

These are NOAA tide predictions. Wind, barometric pressure, and other factors can move real water a foot or more off the table. The chart uses tide predictions, not predictions of water depth or navigation hazards at any particular point. Local knowledge and experience should always take precedent. This app just narrows the calendar for planning purposes.

Start here

Coastal Tide Planner answers one question: which days of a month could I actually get out and get back? Most tide apps hand you a chart and leave the arithmetic to you. This one reads the NOAA predictions for your station, grades every day of the month, and shows you the ones worth taking off work for.

Seven steps

Pick your tide station. ZIP code, city and state, or your location. Choose the one nearest where you launch or fish, not the nearest big city.
Say when you want to leave and how many hours you want on the water.
Set your two allowances. How long after the low tide your route out has enough water, and how long before the next low you need to be back through it. This is the part only you know.
Adjust for distance from the station if the tide reaches you earlier or later than the station reads.
Tap Update the calendar. Every day of the month gets a colour: dark green is best, light green good, grey workable, red not worth it.
Tap any day to see its tide chart, your leave and return times, and the highs and lows.
Use the arrows beside the month name to look ahead.

The part only you can supply

NOAA knows the tide. It does not know the bar at the mouth of your creek, or how much water your boat needs. The two allowances in step 3 are where your own experience counts, and they are what turn a tide table into a plan.

The other half: recording a trip

Planning gets you out the door. The rest of this app is for the trip itself. Tap Record a trip when you leave the ramp and the app draws your track as you go.

The track is the point. It is what Get me home follows, and it is your log of where you went, how long you were out, how far you travelled and how far out you got. None of that needs you to mark a thing. Record every trip, including the familiar ones — the day you need the way home is not the day you will remember to start it.

While it runs, four large buttons let you mark anything new with one tap: shallow water or a bar, rock or oyster, good water, and fish. Each has its own tone, so you know which one registered without looking down. After the first few trips in your own water you will mark less and less, and that is fine. Keep recording.

Every mark is stamped with the tide height at the moment you made it. That stamp is the whole point. A bar you cleared at 2.4 feet of tide may be dry at 0.8, so next time you can tell whether it matters at the water level you are planning for.

When the trip ends it is saved on your phone and drawn on a satellite map, track in yellow, every mark labelled and placed. You can share it, or save a copy to iCloud or Drive.

Get me home — where to find it

While you are recording it is a large red button on the recording screen itself, under the four mark buttons. Tapping it does not stop the recording; only the screen changes, and ← Back to recording returns you to the mark buttons.

Once you have stopped and saved a trip, a red Get me home chip sits at the very top of this page, above everything else, every time you open the app.

Either way it shows the way back along water you have already been through, with the shallow and rock marks still between you and the ramp listed in order, nearest first. While you are out it follows the trip you are on right now. If you are following an older track and you are more than about 200 metres off it, it says so in red across the top — do not steer for a line you cannot see your way to.

Your marks build up over time. Hazards you logged on earlier trips still show on the map, drawn hollow with the date they came from, and any within about half a mile of you are listed. So the oyster bar you found last spring still warns you this fall, whether or not you marked it again.

It is there for the ordinary bad afternoon — fog, dark, a storm moving in — and for the one nobody plans for, where the person who knows the water is not the person who ends up bringing the boat back. Show your crew how it works before you launch. There is a full explanation in Before your first trip, further down.

Designed to cover the 3,499 NOAA tide stations in the United States. .

📍 Choose your tide station

Choose the station closest to where you launch and/or where you plan to boat or fish.

Enter your location

ZIP code

City

🚤 Plan Your Trip

I'd like to leave around

And stay out about this long

1h 10h 4h

Drag the slider to set how many hours you want on the water. Days are then graded on how close to your chosen time the water actually lets you go. If nothing within three hours of it works, the day is marked Not good.

Your water — this is where your own experience matters

Leave minutes after low tide

Return minutes before the next low tide

My area runs minutes earlier / later than the tide station

Because tides vary the further you are from the tide station, choose a time adjustment based on your experience for the area.

Before your first trip — how it works

Your phone screen must stay on. Apple stops a web app from reading GPS the moment the screen locks, so the recorder holds the screen awake for the whole trip. Mount the phone where you can reach it and keep it on a charger if you can. The recording screen is black on purpose — on a modern iPhone black pixels are switched off, so it costs far less battery than it looks like it should.

Do not switch apps or press the side button. That stops the recording. If it happens, the app will tell you and will draw the missing stretch as a broken line rather than pretending you travelled in a straight line across it.

You do not need to look at the screen. Four large buttons, each with its own tone, so you know which one registered by ear.

Record even when you have nothing to mark. Once you know your own water you will stop adding hazards, and that is the point — you already found them. The track still matters. It is what Get me home follows, and it is the record of where you went. A familiar trip with no marks on it is still worth recording.

Get me home — brief your crew before you launch

Get me home retraces the track you are recording, back to where you launched, and lists the shallow and rock marks still ahead of you. While you are recording it follows the trip you are on right now, not an old one. It is the big red button on the recording screen, and it does not stop the recording — only the screen changes. Once a trip is saved, the same thing appears as a red chip at the top of the main page.

Marks carry forward. Hazards from your earlier trips appear on the map drawn hollow, with the date they came from, and the nearby ones are listed. You do not have to re-mark the same bar every time you go out — but you do have to be recording for the way home to follow where you actually are.

Show it to whoever is aboard before you leave the dock. The person who knows the water is not always the person who ends up bringing the boat back. If you are hurt, sick, or over the side, someone who has never run that creek has to get everyone home. Two minutes at the ramp — open the app, tap Get me home, let them see the map and the hazard list — is worth more than anything you could explain to them later. Tell them where the phone will be mounted and leave it there.

If a second phone is aboard, share the trip to it from the map screen. A trip saved on one phone is not on the other.

This is a logbook, not a chart. It records where you went and what you found. It does not know where it is safe to go, it is not a navigation aid, and a hazard you marked at high water is still there at low water. Your eyes and your judgement decide.

🗺 Record a trip

Recording draws your track as you go. That track is what Get me home follows, and it is your record of where you went and how far. Worth doing on every trip, including the ones you could run in your sleep — those are the trips where nobody thinks to start it. While it runs you can also mark anything new you find: shallow spots, rock and oyster, good water, fish. Each mark is stamped with the tide height at that moment.

📚 Glossary — what the words mean

How days are graded

Better — the water lets you leave close to your chosen time and gives you room either side, and the moon is near new or full.

Good — a comfortable window, though it may sit further from your chosen hour or leave you less slack.

Workable — it fits, but only just. Expect a tighter departure or a narrow return.

Not good — nothing on that day lets you leave within three hours of your chosen time and get back before the water drops out.

Slack — how much spare time the window gives you. A window with three hours of slack forgives a late start; one with twenty minutes does not.

Tide words

New moon — the moon sits between us and the sun, so its lit face is turned away and you see nothing. Sun and moon pull from the same direction.

Full moon — the moon is on the far side from the sun, fully lit. Sun and moon now pull from opposite ends, which stretches the water just as hard.

Spring tide — nothing to do with the season. It is the old sense of water springing up: the big swing you get at new and full moon.

Neap tide — the opposite. A weak swing, when the tide neither rises nor falls very far. You get these at the quarter moons.

MLLW — mean lower low water, the zero line NOAA measures heights from. It is the average of the lower of each day’s two lows. A predicted height of 2.0 ft means two feet above that line, not two feet of water under your boat.

Lunar day — about 24 hours 50 minutes, which is why your window slides roughly 50 minutes later each day.

Your two allowances

Departure allowance — how long after the low tide your route out has enough water. Your own knowledge of your creek, not something NOAA can tell you.

Return allowance — how long before the next low tide you need to be back through the same water.

Station time adjustment — tides arrive earlier or later the further you are from the station. Set the difference you have observed and every time in the app shifts with it.

Station types

Reference station — NOAA publishes the full tide curve, minute by minute. Heights between the highs and lows are measured, not estimated.

Subordinate station — NOAA publishes only the highs and lows. This app fills the curve between them with the standard mariner’s estimate, which is typically within one or two percent of the tidal range. About two thirds of the 3,499 stations are of this kind.

Solunar words

Solunar theory — put forward by John Alden Knight in 1926. It holds that fish and game feed hardest when the moon is directly overhead or directly underfoot, and again as it rises and sets.

Major period — about two hours around each lunar transit, when the moon is overhead or underfoot.

Minor period — about an hour around moonrise and moonset.

During your trip — the period falls between your leave and return times, so you would actually be out there for it.

Enough water — the tide serves at that hour, but your planned trip does not cover it. Useful if you can shift your plans.

Worth knowing — solunar tables have been in print for a century, but the evidence behind them is thin. There is little rigorous published work confirming they predict a better catch. Treat them as folklore worth testing against your own log. Tide, water temperature and weather are on far firmer ground.

Recorder words

Track — the yellow line, the water your boat actually went through. Not a recommended route; it is a record of one trip at one tide. The track is the reason to record even when you have nothing new to mark: it is what Get me home follows, and it carries the distance you travelled and how far out you got.

Mark — a spot you tapped a button for, stamped with the predicted tide height at that moment. That stamp is the point: a bar you cleared at 2.4 ft may be a problem at 0.8 ft. Marks are not locked to the trip they were made on — every later trip shows them too, drawn hollow with the date they came from.

Off your track — if you are more than about 200 metres from the track you are following, a red band says how far and when that track was recorded. The app has no idea what lies between you and that line, so it will not pretend otherwise.

Get me home — retraces the track you already recorded, back to where you launched, and lists the shallow and rock marks still ahead of you. It follows water your boat has already been through, so it is not a guess at a route.

Use it when the way back stops being obvious. Fog, dark, a storm moving in, a creek that looks nothing like it did four hours ago at a higher tide, or a day you simply ran further than you meant to.

It also covers the harder case, and this is the reason it exists. The person who knows the water is not always the person who ends up bringing the boat back. If the driver is hurt, sick, or over the side, whoever is left may have never run that creek in their life. They open the app, tap Get me home, and follow the yellow line the boat already travelled, with every hazard flagged along it. That only works if the trip was recorded on the way out, which is the argument for recording every time, even on water you know cold — and for walking the crew through it at the ramp, before you launch, rather than leaving them to work it out on the water.

If more than one phone is aboard, share the trip from the map screen so the second phone has the same track. A trip saved on one phone is not on the other.

One caution. It retraces your track; it does not promise a safe route. The tide will have moved since you came through. A bar you cleared on the way out can be dry on the way back, which is exactly why every mark carries the tide height at the moment it was made.