When paddling on the ocean, there are several different environmental facts that need to be considered. One of these is the tides. How much the changing tide affects your paddling trip depends on whether your paddling relatively open water as opposed to a more enclosed area, such as a bay, harbor, or tidal estuary. It also depends on the phase of the moon, and to a lesser extend, where Earth is in its orbit around the sun. The complexities of tides can get fairly intricate, but we can aid our paddling a good deal just by carrying a broad set of information with us. What follows is intended as a broad stroke view of tides, and is intentionally simplified to be such.

When paddling on the coastline, or across any open body of water, it is crucial to understand what the wind will be doing, and how that will affect both surface conditions and the travel of your boat. When considering wind forecasts, we have to consider both the speed and direction of the wind.