Queen Tides
- skagitjack
- Dec 7, 2025
- 4 min read
Winds rattled our windows; rain pounded the roof. Perfect conditions, I thought to myself.
An hour before sunrise, I rose and drove toward Bowman Bay. Limbs, branches, and even a tree trunk littered Rosario Road. Monstrous Doug firs still danced drunkenly above. Entering Bowman Bay’s roadway, I could hear the surf crashing on the beach long before I got there. Clouds were scudding wildly out of the west. Waves rolled and smashed into the logs lining the shoreline, pulling several out into the water. Washed-up kelp, seaweed, and wood debris of all sizes filled the trail.
This was a king tide with attitude. (We have too many kings in power. Let's call it a Queen Tide.)
What is a queen or king tide?
Here are the basics (Take my Tides and Currents class to get the bigger picture):
The moon creates about two-thirds of our tides, the sun one-third. When the sun and moon align, at a new moon or full moon, they work together (syzygy), so we get our highest high tides and our lowest low tides.
Did you know that the moon travels in an elliptical pattern around the Earth, so sometimes it's closer to Earth, and sometimes farther away. Similarly, our Earth travels around the sun in an elliptical pattern. We are closer to the sun in winter — bet you thought it would be summer, but no, it’s in our winter, which is summer in the southern hemisphere.
So, in the months closest to winter solstice, at a new or full moon, when the moon also happens to be hugging us closer than usual due to its orbit, our high tides become much higher than average. This is called a king tide. (Again, I can call it a queen tide, just for fun.)
THEN, throw in a low-pressure storm, which brings heavy rains and strong winds to our coast, and the tides rise even higher than that. That’s why I was excited to see Bowman Bay this past Saturday. High tide was just before daybreak; it was a day past the full moon, so we had syzygy. And the storm was howling!
Walking the beach at Bowman was not possible. There was no beach, only logs tossed by each incoming wave. I walked to Lottie Beach south of Bowman Bay, and that sandy beach had also disappeared, the waves crashing right into the dune grass.
The Bowman beach had been rebuilt ten years earlier for storms such as this, to roll with the punches, the logs absorbing the energy, the grasses holding onto the shoreline with deep roots. This is how a beach should look, armored the way nature does it.
I reveled in the wild wonder of this northwest storm at the highest of tides. I went back home with the fury of the wind and waves still echoing in my soul, and the balance of waves and shoreline a welcome lesson in so many ways.
jack
Digging Deeper:
We have one more set of potential king tides coming the first few days of January. Look for them January 3 – 6. If a storm is brewing, be ready.
El Niño years make it especially tricky to predict when the highest tides will hit. One of the effects of El Niño is to bring warm water and elevated sea levels to the west coast, which may significantly increase the number of very high tides. This winter is a La Niña year, however.
Be safe: be careful on slippery logs, or better yet stay off of them as they might move. Watch out for rogue waves. And obey safety signage and guard rails. And never drive through water on a roadway that might be deeper than you think.
Historically:
On Dec. 27, 2022, king tides hit home, causing substantial flooding.
The storm took out a third of the parking lot at West Beach at Deception Pass. The pavement, tables and stoves disappeared into the waves.
In Anacortes, the westbound lanes of Highway 20 from the Swinomish Golf Course to Sharp’s Corner Roundabout flooded for about two hours, making them impassable. The road along the east side of March’s Point, near the T-Bailey factory and Baker View, also flooded.
And the main road in downtown La Conner was flooded from the Swinomish Channel.
in 2012, a king tide, high winds, and a storm surge flooded the Samish Indian Nation’s Fidalgo Bay Resort Convention Center, resulting in $120,000 in damages.
Picture It!
A state-led project is encouraging people to upload photos of king tides and other high-water events. The documentation helps scientists, local planners, and others understand how sea level rise and storm surges affect infrastructure and ecosystems.
King tides and sea level rise
Paying attention to naturally occurring king tides is important because they provide a glimpse at what local sea level rise will look like in the future. Since we’re still working to curb greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise is among the more certain climate change impacts.
Over the past century, for instance, sea levels have risen about eight inches in Seattle. The king tides of today will be our everyday high tides in the future.
In Washington, sea level rise is caused by the combined effects of global sea level rise, local factors such as vertical land movement variability stemming from our region’s active tectonics, and seasonal ocean elevations due to atmospheric circulation effects.
Sea level rise will increase the severity of existing coastal hazards, such as shoreline and coastal bluff erosion, storm surge, flooding, and saltwater intrusion. These effects will contribute to loss of habitat, damage to homes and key infrastructure, loss of access to shoreline areas, salinity changes in streams and groundwater, threatened food security, and other social, cultural, and economic impacts.
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