You’ve seen him. He’s that guy you overheard at the lunch table the other day, going on and on about the Bay of Fundy (“Did you know that the difference between high and low there is 48 feet? That’s a four storey building!”). The one you overheard at that dinner party, bragging about his clock, the one that can log high and low at three different locations. The one with vanity license plates that say “slkwtr”—and you’re just sppsd t knw that that’s short for “slackwater.” And you’re just supposed to know what “slackwater” is.
He’s the guy who has tideapp.com on his iPhone, just in case he should suddenly find himself in, say, coastal Australia.
He’s the Tidal Bore, the man for whom everything revolves around that twice-daily surge of water, experienced by bodies of water as vast as the Pacific Ocean, and as small as the Great Lakes. (“Well, they’re not really tides, but did you know that the Great Lakes have been known to experience freakish tide-like swells called seiches, in which the water level can rise by as much as ten feet in fifteen minutes?”)
Full moons are kind of a big deal to the Tidal Bore, so you’ll want to give him a wide berth for the next few days. If you don’t, you’ll be treated to a twenty or thirty minute lecture on spring tides (“they don’t have anything to do with the spring, you see”), complete with scale models of the earth, moon and sun.