You never know when you'll need it...

You may already have ponied up the money for the Navionics iPhone app (if you haven't, I recommend you give that decision another thought...).  But if you haven't, you will still need tide information.  Now, at most locations you can find a little annual booklet with tide information for free or for a nominal cost.  But these are not easy to use if your destination is not one of the primaries documented in the book, requiring you to use the offset tables.

What's an iPhone owner to do?

Enter Shralp Tide - an app dedicated to just this purpose.  Based on the gold standard XTide software and ported to run in the IOS environment, Shralp Tide makes tidal predictions all over the world available right there on your iPhone/iPad.

Everything you need is right there on the screen -

• Current tide height
• Direction of movement (ebb/flood)
• Times of next/prev high and low tides
• Heights of next high and low tides

And two very key features:

• It's free.
• No internet connection is required.

And for the visually-oriented, if you turn your iDevice to landscape mode you get a graphical representation which will be vaguely familiar to XTide users. 

Oh, and did I mention that it's free?

But if you are willing to pay a paltry 99¢, you get an improved version that also includes tidal current predictions.  I've been using the free version for years, but because tidal currents are a big part of navigating Puget Sound, I recently went to the paid version.  They're both excellent.

And you never know when you might need to have this app... last Saturday while working in the garage, I got a call from my son.  He and his wife were hiking Washington's wild Pacific coast and needed to know when the next high tide was coming in order to decide whether to round a headland with a minimal beach.  Shralp Tide provided me the information while standing there covered with grease and a long way from the boat and her GPS or a tide booklet, because it was right there in my hand, on my phone.

You never know when you'll need it...