How Tides Influence Fishing Success

“Time and tide wait for no man,” wrote the ‘father of English literature’, Geoffrey Chaucer, way back in 1395 in his classic The Canterbury Tales. Now, while an argument could be made these days about devices like locks and flood surge barriers, it is largely still true that we humans have control over neither time nor tide.

How tides work

There are quite a few factors that control the tidal flows in the Earth’s oceans, but in basic terms, the most powerful is the gravitational pull of the Moon. As the Moon orbits the Earth its gravity acts on the Earth’s water, pulling a bulge (the high tide) on the side of the Earth facing the Moon, with a low tide on the side of the Earth facing away from the Moon.