Brief Highlights of Washington Coast King Tides So Far (and Some Oregon Video)

Published 11/26/23 a 7:55 p.m.
By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Westport, Washington) – Things be gettin' craaazy already for this king tides event along the Oregon coast and Washington coast. Videos and photos of the wild tides are surfacing already on social, while showing a sunny, lovely stretch of blue skies against the foreground of unruly tides rather than the usual gray and stormy days.

Few things are as captivating as big tides on the beach as the sun pours down – instead of the rain.

While the Oregon Coast King Tides Project has not posted any of its captures yet, the Washington coast side of the border has plopped a few online.

Among them: the above shot of Westport, Washington, showing the observation tower there looking like it's going to get swatted. That's only a matter of the perspective.

Photographer Stefanie Baltzell snapped the photo at 10:13 a.m. on November 25 (Saturday), across the bay from the tower, which would require a zoom lens to get that close.

Zoom lenses create a kind of compacting effect, causing objects in their view to become compressed, and things like these large waves that are in the foreground can appear much larger when looking at objects in the background. Thus, the waves – which are undoubtedly much closer to Betzell – appear as if they're the same height as the tower that's much farther back, and thus much smaller.

That being said, data from the Washington Coast King Tides page shows the water level in the bay was over 9 feet at this moment in Grays Harbor, which definitely creates some large waves.

Project data says this was taken 26 minutes before high tide, which was predicted to be just over 10 feet.

Photo King Tides / Cherie Fisher

Further north on Saturday, contributor Cherie Fisher snapped Ocean Shores in a bit of a wild state.

She had situated herself at the north jetty of Grays Harbor, which is normally a vast expanse of flat sands and calm conditions.

These photos were done about 20 to 40 minutes after 11 a.m., sometime after high tides. Water levels were reported at 9.5 feet at the time.

Here, the jetty is battered by large breakers. Conditions are unruly enough to seemingly cause some churning up of mud in the bay, which is likely what the brown waves are in the photos.

Oregon Coast Beach Connection will feature more highlights of this season's event later, as images become available.

Seaside Aquarium recently reposted this amazing video of tidal conditions completely scouring Hug Point just south of Cannon Beach. This rather hair-raising video was taken years ago, but is still chilling to watch today. That cove is normally accessible to humans. It's nowhere close to that at this moment.

On the Washington coast, submit them to https://mycoast.org/wa. On the Oregon coast, submit them to www.oregonkingtides.net or the project’s Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/orkingtide/albums.

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Andre' GW Hagestedt is editor, owner and primary photographer / videographer of Oregon Coast Beach Connection, an online publication that sees over 1 million pageviews per month. He is also author of several books about the coast.

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