Best tide app for cruising sailors

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Downloading tide data has become easier and cheaper. Sam Fortescue reviews the latest options in an increasingly crowded market and picks the best tide apps for sailors

Most of the best tide apps charge a subscription fee, but there are many cheap tide apps to choose from.

The most basic of tide apps provide height and time to let you know when to set off, circle the headlands, and depth to anchor.

Some do this offline for free, but better designed and more powerful apps also offer tide curves that you can explore, allowing you to visualize the rest of the tide ebb and flow, but some of these is a general curve that requires attention.

Not all tide apps offer the same level of support, so check the app that covers the area you’re sailing.

Remember that areas of anomalous tidal behavior, especially in the Sorrentine region with two high tides and a very rapid ebb, can magnify the error.

Also, the app doesn’t always specify whether it uses UTC or local time, which can introduce an error of 1 hour.

Tidal app for sailors

Tides planner

Developer: Imlay
£3.49 per year. www.imray.com

The Imray Tide App is free to download, requires no network connection, and covers 8,000 locations worldwide.

It shows height and time, neap tides and springs, has tide curves, and lets you set a minimum depth horizon to indicate when it should be cleared.

A vertical line allows you to follow the curve of your day, showing depth and time at various points.

If you want to look into the future, you have to buy a license for £3.49 per calendar year. This makes him six days old in British waters, the day in France, and in Italy and the United States he can be seen at any time of the year. Australia, New Zealand and some others.

If you would like to extend your access to tide data for any day of the year in all regions, an additional Hydrographic Office license is required for an additional charge of £4.99.

This also gives access to tidal current data for the UK and France.

The interface is informative but outdated, and the panning map feature, which allows you to pinpoint a small point at a weather station, requires an eagle eye and sharp fine motor skills.

A useful addition is the ability to switch between different tidal notation systems, such as the French coefficient, to adjust for different datums.

Upgrade from £3.49/year.

Eighties

Developer: Hahn Software
£9.99, iOS only. www.ayetides.com

View tide times and heights for 12,500 locations worldwide. You can search by name or navigate on the map.

The basic display for each station shows the time and height of the high and low water levels for the day, with past ones grayed out.

It also displays sun and moon times and provides compact tide curves.

Turning your phone sideways will enter landscape mode with a larger interactive curve. Works offline, no mobile connection required.

It has a large range covering dates through the end of 2030.

However, a quick look revealed that the app struggled with accuracy in Sorrento, which has a long flood stand and a second storm surge.

Tides Pro

Developer: Elecon LLC
£3.49 per year. www.tidespro.com

Provides global tide forecasts, complete with times, heights, charts and maps. However, UK coverage is mediocre at just 112 stations.

If you’re lucky enough to sail through one of the covered areas, you’ll find the interface to be great, with a large tide curve and even a tide clock.

Curves are plotted for 5 days and can be easily scrolled with a swipe.

You can see the height at that time by touch, but you cannot set the horizontal line that indicates the minimum depth.

Another useful feature is a stacked bar chart that shows how the tide will change over the next three weeks. This allows you to clearly visualize the fluctuations between neap and spring tides.

absolute tide

Developer: Darren Edwards
£2.49

It’s free to download, but a £2.49 license is required to display calendar year tides.

This gives you access to accurate UKHO official data for the UK and Ireland, with tide curves and a very useful tide atlas.

The graph may look simple, but it does exactly what it needs to do.

For example, you can set a minimum depth horizontal bar that indicates when the tide curve crosses this set limit.

Sliding from left to right examines the curve for the exact height at that point.

Tap the “Stream” function to switch to the tide atlas. Select the area you want and move it back and forth in time to see how the set and flow change.

This information resembles a simple scan of the corresponding page in the UKHO Atlas, but works well.

As a handy bonus, the app also provides coastal water forecasts for all coastal regions of the UK.

The only complaint is that you can’t simply swipe from one day to the next, instead you have to go back to the calendar and select a new date.

Cursors display height and time, but it would be nice to have a handy axis scale as well.

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Tide tables near me

Developer: Seventh Gear
£1.79 Ad-free. www.7thg.com/mobile-apps

Access over 7,000 global tide stations and visualize forecasts with detailed curves and lunar cycles.

There is also a rain radar and weather forecast screen, and it also supports Apple Watch.

There are relatively few British stations on the list, perhaps dozens, and the tidal curve looks simplistic.

Southampton’s infamous double storm surge and young flood stands give it a curve that looks more like a mountain range than a pleasing parabola, but it’s largely unacknowledged.

Can be used in simple, clean tide areas. Certainly, a chart showing upcoming range changes would be useful.

There doesn’t seem to be a date limit on the data, so you can look as far ahead as you like.

my tide

Developer: JRustonApps BV
£1.79 Ad-free. www.jrustonapps.com

The app only provides basic time and height data, with no hints of curves, although it does have moon phases.

It passed the Southampton tidal anomaly test and displayed the times of the first and second high tides, but the accuracy is not the greatest point, as the time and height varied by more than an hour, and in some cases by more than 50 cm.

Global stations are accessible via a simple pin-studded map covering a range of UK standard and secondary ports.

You can look up to 6 days ahead in the UK and up to 1 month ahead in Europe and other regions.

The app is free, but the Pro version costs £1.79 and is ad-free.

UK tide

Developer: Jim Burke
£3.49

Don’t get confused with the app with nearly the same name below. Jim Burke’s UKTides are the real deal.

It costs just £3.49, so you get great access to a wealth of accurate information, including real tide curves.

You can also call up the corresponding month of official UKHO tide times for standard or secondary ports up to 1 year ahead (up to 250 years in the past!).

The tide curves are marked with lines showing the average high and low water levels for spring and neap tides, and you can examine the curves at 5-minute intervals.

You can also switch to fullscreen mode by simply rotating your phone sideways.

A particularly nice feature of this impressive app is the way the tide information is displayed. This is shown as a diamond on the Apple map around the port you are looking at.

A simple tap on the diamond will show you the tides and currents along with the reference port and the latitude and longitude of the diamond for easy reference on your paper chart.

The only downside to this first-class navigation aid is that it has to download data in real time, so it only works if you have a good enough internet connection.UK waters only.

British tide

Developer: TXTVault
free

A basic free app displaying tide times and levels for over 220 UK standard and secondary ports.

Search by name or map to see forecasts for the day, current actual heights, and time to next fill.

There is no apparent awareness of tidal anomalies. This means that times and heights at the Southampton test station tend to differ significantly from official data.

Also, some of the text is difficult to read against the background. However, scrolling through the dates through the end of 2023 is fairly easy. This is a bonus.

It also has the added benefit of being able to easily switch between British Summer Time and Greenwich Mean Time (UTC) and working offline.

British tides

Developer: Wingism
£1.79 per year

A popular app that uses over 500 locations in the UK to automatically find the nearest station.

It then provides simple curves and tide times.

Again, it can’t handle erratic tides, so it’s not suitable for sailing in complex tidal regions, but it works well enough if you want the simple basics.

The free download provides tide times up to two days in advance. For more forecasts you should subscribe for £1.79/year.

Tide data is actually built into the app, so you don’t need to go to the internet to get the information you’re looking for.

(Don’t confuse this app with the UKTides app by Jim Burke above.)