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George Huxtable wrote:

> At perigee springs, at the Northeast end of the Bay of Fundy, the tidal
> range can reach 50 ft, rather than the 20 ft quoted by Doug. Near here, in
> the Bristol Channel, it can exceed 40 ft. These are big tides.


According to the Canadian Hydrographic Service tide tables, the Large
Tide range at Burntcoat Head (in the Minas Basin, at the head of Fundy)
is 52.6 feet. The range from HHW to LLW when perigee coincides with
spring tide will be a bit more than that.

Until recently, the second highest tides in the ocean were said to be in
Ungava Bay. A group in northern Quebec objected to being ranked as
second and CHS re-measured the tides up there, leading them to announce
a few weeks ago that, with the available data, they cannot say which
tidal station has the greatest range. The estimate for Ungava Bay still
comes out lower than that for Burntcoat Head but CHS does not have a
full 18.7-year run of data for either station, leaving enough
uncertainty to fudge the issue.

The head of the Bristol Channel still seems to be ranked as having the
third greatest range, with the local maximum somewhere near Newport I
believe. Unfortunately, my prized old copy of Arrowsmith's tables only
gives the heights of high tide for the various Channel ports and has
those relative to the sills of the dock entrances rather than to chart
datum, so I cannot extract ranges from the data on hand.


Trevor Kenchington


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Trevor J. Kenchington PhD                         Gadus@iStar.ca
Gadus Associates,                                 Office(902) 889-9250
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