TTT Explores King Tides in Washington
/I picked up Juliette’s flat Stanley for my trip and was surprised because, while definitely flat, this was not a boy named Stanley but a girl named Tens Twenties Thirties (TTT)! I was glad to have a colorful companion on this photo expedition & taped her to a mini tripod where she could stand on her own. I then covered her with tape as a raincoat since it was due to rain, and we set off for Cape Disappointment in Washington state to photograph king tides. Here she is ready to go.
Now, sometimes photographers have to do unusual things to get their pictures, and this was one of those times. The high tide our first day was at 7:30 AM; to see the biggest waves one has to be there 2 hours before high tide, and the coastal site for the pictures is two hours away. So…TTT, Bindi and I set out in the middle of the night, 3:30 AM while most everyone else was sleeping and it was pitch black dark. It was a foggy drive but, we managed to arrive at our site, Cape Disappointment, just before sunrise. It was an unusual clear day so we saw beautiful colors during what’s called the blue hour - the hours before dawn when the sky is a very dark blue and orange reflecting the coming emergence of the sun still beneath the horizon. Here’s how it looked. Pretty beautiful!
But good weather meant no great big waves from king tides so we coped with disappointment at Cape Disappointment because there wouldn’t be many pictures of big waves for TTT to bring back and show you. We decided we’d just try to make the best of it. There were 1 or 2 big waves as you can see here.
Then, since my dog Bindi accompanied TTT and me we took her on a walk. Along the way we happened upon some interesting sights…views of the Pacific Ocean
and fungi growing on the path and in a tree. First we found Turkey Tail, almost as colorful as TTT. Next we saw Chaga, a big knot on a tree branch.
We wanted to tell you a bit about where we were.
Did you know that rivers have a mouth? They do, the place where the river ends and releases its waters into another larger body of water like a lake or the ocean. Cape Disappointment , where we were, is in Illwaco, WA , a town at the mouth of the Columbia River where it ends at the Pacific Ocean. We got here by driving to Oregon’s most northwest town, Astoria, and crossing a bridge to reach Washington State. Illwaco and Cape Disappointment State Park are 14 miles north of that bridge.
The mouth of the Columbia is one of the most fearsome stretches of water in the world, known for centuries as the “Graveyard of the Pacific.” By one estimate, more than 2,000 ships have been wrecked here since record keeping began in 1792. The reason, according to Captain Mark Hails, who is based in Astoria, is simple: the convergence of four elemental forces—wind, waves, tides, and currents—creating a vortex of energy that poses unique dangers to shipping.
Hails is a Columbia River Bar pilot, a highly trained expert at guiding container ships and other giant vessels through the waters that swirl around the sand that guards the river’s mouth. Inbound or outbound, when ships need to cross the bar, they rely on Hails and his 14 fellow pilots to take command of the bridge and steer a safe passage.
The hazards are the stuff of legend: breakers 40 feet high, howling winds, relentless currents, and treacherous tides. To maintain control of the vessel, pilots have to balance these vectors with the precision of a gymnast executing a double backflip. “The problem is that each force pushes a ship in a different direction,” Hails says. “That’s what makes this so crazy.”
Columbia River Mouth and Bar (Wikipedia)
The Columbia is big by any standard: It drains an area of a quarter-million square miles, including most of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and much of Montana, British Columbia, and Alberta. What makes it so dangerous is its unusual geometry. Most big rivers terminate in deltas, where the river splits into hundreds of distributaries, like a fraying rope. The Amazon, the Mississippi, the Nile, and the Mekong have deltas that are hundreds of miles wide, dissipating the flow.
The Columbia is different. Hemmed in by implacable basalt cliffs, the water is confined to a single channel. Making matters worse, it narrows at the mouth, where Clatsop Spit in Oregon and Washington’s Cape Disappointment come together like a carpenter’s vice. Following Bernouilli’s Law, which states that a fluid flowing through a constriction will accelerate, the river picks up speed and comes blasting through the mouth with unmatched fury, throwing about 7,500 tons of water at the Pacific Ocean every second.
“It’s like putting your thumb on a garden hose,” Hails says. “There aren’t many rivers in the world with a current that strong.”
As the current speeds up, it dumps sediment on the ocean floor, forming a kidney-shaped sandbar a couple of miles offshore. This bar triggers the opposing force—the Pacific swell. Waves born off Japan’s coast grow in strength as they travel across the Pacific, gaining momentum from ocean storms. When they encounter the sudden shallow water at the bar, they break and detonate, hurling their pent-up energy straight into the swift river current. Throw in the unpredictable effects of storm winds and turning tides and you unleash the monster.
Columbia Bar shipwrecks map (NW Power and Conservation Council)
Trying to Tame Nature
“Mere description can give little idea of the terrors of the bar of the Columbia,” said Captain Charles Wilkes, whose sloop, the USS Peacock, was shipwrecked near Astoria in 1841. “All who have seen it have spoken of the wildness of the scene, and the incessant roar of the waters, representing it as one of the most fearful sights that can possibly meet the eye of the sailor.”
With its constant shifting, the bar claimed so many ships that Congress intervened. In 1884, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction on a massive jetty to protrude into the Pacific from Clatsop Spit. A second jetty was added in 1914. The jetties were designed to concentrate the flow of the river like a firehose, scour the riverbed, and push the bar away from the mouth.
The jetties helped—today the bar is more stable and lies farther offshore—but hardly tamed the monster. Crossing the bar is still perilous, especially for marine giants like container ships. These vessels need deep water—about 43 feet of draft. The only safe passage for them is to stay true to a narrow shipping channel that runs along the deepest course of the river, which is 600 feet wide. If they stray into shallower water, they risk running aground on the riverbed and getting spun like a pinwheel. That’s more or less what happened to the Ever Given, which got stuck like a chicken bone in the Suez Canal in 2021, or the MV Dalí, which demolished Baltimore’s Key Bridge earlier this spring.
Given a couple of million years, geologists predict the Columbia will settle down and develop a delta. In the meantime, let’s treat the river with respect. It is a phenomenal force whose true depth lies hidden beneath the surface.
Illwaco, the town located near here, is a small town, population approximately 1000 people in winter, 3000 in summer due to tourism.
Fishing and crabbing are the main industries here in addition to tourism. It’s a prime spot for catching salmon because it’s close to Marine area ! In the ocean, As we drove through town we saw many crab pots and boats both on land and in the harbor. Because of Cape Disappointment shipwrecks Illwaco residents have a long history of rescuing shipwrecked boats and people , salvaging goods from the ships, and carrying home crates of goods that washed ashore. Nowadays the residents are accustomed to the arrival of large groups of photographers during winter when king tides occur.
What is a king tide and what causes it? The scientific name for a king tide is a perigean spring tide. "Perigean" means the moon is at its closest point to Earth, and "spring" refers to a new or full moon. The gravitational pull of the moon is about twice as strong as the sun's, so when it’s this close to earth it adds to the sun’s gravitational pull creating extra strong tidal forces causing king tides. These occur once or twice a year and usually the waves are 2 or more feet higher than usual high tides. They can cause flooding and can be dangerous so we must watch them from a safe distant spot. Oregon and Washington usually have 3 episodes of King Tides between November and January. TTT and I saw the January ones between the 10th and 13th. While usual high tides are 5-7 ft, these were expected to be above 9 1/2 ft. However, they only get this high at the shoreline when there are higher winds and ocean swells which were not happening when we arrived. So we saw a few large waves crash onto the rocks but nothing too dramatic. Here are pictures of 2 information displays we found at the cape .
And here’s a picture of an old shipwreck still on the beach at Fort Stevens State Park.
We finished our first day of pictures and exploring so it was time to find our Airbnb room which meant a trip on the Astoria bridge which crosses the Columbia River and returned us to Oregon for the nite. It was a nice place. Here are TTT and Bindi trying out their bed for the next 2 nights.
We returned twice more to high tide at Cape Disappointment on the next 2 days and finally on day 3 we got terrible weather with winds and ocean swells so the waters were churning with giant waves crashing into the shoreline. Even though it was pouring rain, more than 50 photographers crowded the shoreline and it was challenging finding a good spot to watch the action! But we climbed up on a mountain of driftwood and got a few pictures to share with you. One thing’s for sure, you don’t try to go swimming in waters like this! King Tides have been known to wash careless people out to sea, so we kept our respectful distance. In some pictures you can see the waves growing bigger and bigger until they are almost as high as the cliff behind them. That is a king tide wave. TTT stayed in the car for this part. It was too windy and rainy for her to be safe out in the weather.
Finally we dried off and returned home. It was good to get out of the wild weather but we’ll go back next year in hopes of finding even wilder, bigger waves!