Understanding Solent Tides

The Solent gets two high waters on each tide rather than one. The water rises, holds near the top for a long spell, dips slightly, then rises again to a second peak before finally ebbing away.

The explanation you'll hear on most piers is that water comes in through both ends — round the Needles and past Bembridge — and the two floods arrive at different times. It's a tidy story and it's wrong. The actual cause sits much further offshore: friction, uneven depths and the narrowing of the Channel between the Isle of Wight and the Cherbourg peninsula set up additional oscillations across a body of water bounded roughly by Portland, Cherbourg, Littlehampton and Le Havre. Those extra oscillations layer on top of the normal twice-daily tide, and the combined curve is what gives Southampton and the Solent their double peak.

There's a second oddity worth knowing. The young flood stand happens about two hours after low water, most noticeably on springs. The tide comes away from low water, then the rate of rise slackens right off for a couple of hours before accelerating again into the final climb. If you're fishing a mark where the fish come in with the push, that stall can feel like the tide has died on you. It hasn't — it picks up again.

Source: Southampton VTS — Hydrography and Southampton tides

Spring tides come a couple of days after the new and full moon. They rise higher, drop lower and run harder. Neaps fall around the half moon, with less range and gentler flow. The cycle runs about a fortnight from one set of springs to the next.

There's a persistent belief that big springs always fish best. On the Solent that's too simple, and it costs people sessions.

The practical version: match the tide to the mark rather than chasing the biggest numbers. A shallow surf beach wants some movement. A deep pier end on a screaming spring ebb is close to unfishable with sensible leads. Plenty of good Solent anglers deliberately fish the middle tides — the days between springs and neaps — because they get some flow without the chaos.

Tide matters because it dictates when food is available and when a fish can safely reach it. Two things are going on at once.

Moving water dislodges food. A running tide lifts worms out of the sand, rolls crabs along the bottom and pushes small fish off structure. Slack water does almost none of that, which is why bites so often stop dead at the top and bottom of the tide and start again as soon as the flow returns.

Depth grants access. Bass in particular will come into water barely deep enough to cover their backs when the flood lets them, hunting ground that was dry sand two hours earlier. That's why the first push over a shallow reef or a mussel bed is so often the best twenty minutes of the session.

The exceptions matter though. Deep marks like the end of Ryde Pier or the Fort Victoria channel drop often fish better on the ebb, when the tide sweeps food off the shallower ground above and funnels it past you. Estuary marks in Wootton Creek or around St Helens can produce best on the last of the ebb, as fish drop back with the falling water and concentrate in the channels.

This catches people out constantly. A tide table for Portsmouth does not describe what the water is doing at Yarmouth. High water at Hurst Point, at the western entrance, runs over an hour earlier than Portsmouth on springs, low water about half an hour earlier, and the range can be as much as two metres less.

An hour's error is the difference between arriving for the top of the flood and arriving to find the tide already halfway out. If you're travelling to an unfamiliar mark, check the tide for the nearest standard port and apply the local time difference rather than assuming one table covers the whole area.

The trip planner on the home page handles the mark-by-mark offsets for you — pick your venue and target species and it works out the window. But it's worth understanding what it's doing, particularly if you fish somewhere it doesn't list.

Source: National Coastwatch Institution — Solent tides

Tide tables are predictions, not measurements. Weather shifts them.

A sustained blow from the south-west pushes water into the Solent and can hold the tide higher and longer than predicted. A hard northerly does the reverse. Low atmospheric pressure raises sea level slightly, high pressure depresses it. None of this is dramatic in normal conditions, but combine a big spring, a deep low and a strong onshore wind and the water will go further up the beach than the table suggests — which is a safety point as much as a fishing one, and one the shore safety guide deals with properly.

Wind direction also does something more useful. Two or three days of onshore wind colours the water and stirs food out of the sand, which suits bass, smoothhound and rays. A long settled spell of easterlies leaves the water gin-clear, which kills bait fishing on some marks but makes lure work far more viable. Reading the few days before your session is often more informative than the forecast for the session itself.