Port Orford Tide Pools 2026: Battle Rock Beach & Oregon's Deepest Winter Low Tides

Port Orford's deepest daylight water of 2026 came in July: −2.46 ft MLLW on Tuesday, July 14 at 6:37 AM (NOAA station 9431647). What's left belongs to the evening. As of October 11, 27 windows with at least 30 minutes of daylight overlap remain in 2026, 22 of them minus tides, and the deepest — November 24–25 and December 23–24 — all bottom out after the roughly 4:47 PM sunset. Christmas Eve's −2.21 ft at 6:14 PM is the deepest low among daylight-overlap windows at any of the four Oregon stations we compute this king season, but the low itself arrives in the dark.

An earlier version of this guide called December 24 "the deepest daylight water of 2026, nearly half a foot below anything summer managed." That was wrong on both counts, and the corrected comparison is below: July 14's −2.46 ft beats Christmas Eve by a quarter foot, and the half-foot margin only holds against the August run, not against summer. What is true: at Port Orford — the southernmost Oregon station we compute, on the far south coast where US 101 bends around a natural deepwater port — the four deepest lows still ahead in 2026 all land in November and December, after sunset — between roughly 40 and 100 minutes past it, per the table below. The Oregon hub calls the king-season depth chart a staircase that deepens as you go south; Port Orford is the bottom step.

What's left in 2026 at Port Orford

The eight deepest remaining windows with at least 30 minutes of daylight overlap, October 11–December 31, 2026, ranked by depth:

Computed 2026-10-11 from NOAA station 9431647 predictions, MLLW. "Daylight in window" is overlap between the modeled below-+1.0-ft window and daylight; it can fall entirely before the low. A window score does not verify beach access, park hours, or route conditions.

Read the sunset column against the time-of-low column: in seven of the eight rows, the low itself arrives after dark. The exception is Tuesday, December 22 — a −1.63 ft low at 4:39 PM, eight minutes before the 4:47 PM sunset, with 153 minutes of daylight in the window. It is the deepest remaining 2026 low you can actually watch arrive, which makes it the row worth circling, even though three other rows go deeper after dark.

The remaining windows come in the usual spring-tide runs: October 25–27 (deepening evening lows, Fair band), November 22–25 (the Good-band run that peaks at −2.05 ft on Wednesday the 25th), December 5–8 (shallow), and December 20–24 (the deepest run of the season). The weekends sit on the shallow edges of each run — Sunday, November 22's −0.51 ft at 4:09 PM is the best-scoring weekend window left in 2026 (the only weekend one in the Good band), while Sunday, November 8 dips slightly deeper (−0.58 ft at 5:20 PM) on a lower score. Day-by-day windows are on the station page.

When was the lowest tide at Port Orford in 2026?

For the record this guide originally led with, here is the table as computed on July 21 — the eight deepest daylight lows then remaining — kept as dated history. Its rows still match the current fact sheets:

Computed 2026-07-21 from NOAA station 9431647 predictions, MLLW; "remaining" meant July 21 onward, which is why the deeper July 13–16 run — including the year's −2.46 ft on July 14 — is absent.

The score column against the depth column still tells the station's story. The four deepest rows — all winter, all after sunset — score in the 60s because so much of their water arrives after sunset. The August rows gave up half a foot of depth and scored 7 to 17 points higher, because a 6 AM low in August had a full morning of light behind it. But the full-period ranking belongs to summer: July 14's −2.46 ft and July 15's −2.38 ft, both Exceptional-band 90s, were the deepest daylight lows in our July–December data — December 24 runs a quarter foot shallower and scores 25 points lower. The half-foot winter margin this guide once claimed only works against August 12's −1.74 ft, not against summer.

The July and August windows (now past)

The near-term table this guide shipped with, kept as dated history:

The eight best windows of the then-next 60 days, computed 2026-07-21 from NOAA station 9431647. Scores (0–100) weigh tide depth and daylight together.

The August 11–14 run was the year's last morning minus-tide series, and it rewarded the alarm unevenly. Tuesday the 11th was nearly as deep as the peak (−1.72 ft) but its 5:34 AM low came about 46 minutes before first light. Wednesday the 12th was the pick: deepest water of the run, with the low landing almost exactly at sunrise. Thursday the 13th matched Wednesday's score of 80 by the opposite trade — a shallower low, after sunrise, at a kinder 7:00 AM. Port Orford's low came earliest of the four Oregon stations on August 12 (6:19 AM here, 7:04 AM at Garibaldi — the tide swept the coast south to north in 45 minutes). The mechanics behind every deep dawn low on this coast are in the dawn-lows guide; the archived day-by-day windows are on the August calendar.

After Friday, August 14, that was it: no Oregon station we compute sees another morning minus tide below −1 ft in 2026 — re-verified against the full current window data on October 11. August had 12 daylight minus tides at Port Orford; September managed 3.

The shores: Battle Rock, Rocky Point, Agate Beach

Battle Rock Beach is the one you can't miss — the wayside park sits right on US 101 in the middle of town. "Battle Rock Park is named for the historic battle that took place at Battle Rock where the Qua-to-mah Native Americans fought Captain William Tichenor's men in 1851," per Travel Oregon; today, per the local chamber, "there is a city-maintained Visitor Center and restroom there for information about the park and the area." "The beach is just a short walk away from the parking lot," notes Oregon Discovery's park guide, and "day-use fees: none" — no gate, no pass, town amenities a block away. The same guide points low-tide visitors toward the port side of the cove, noting that north of the dock "there is an intertidal area with many colorful marine creatures" — sea stars, anemones, and urchins among them — in tide pools.

Rocky Point, at the south end of that stretch, is where the rules change. The Redfish Rocks Marine Reserve is "located off the south Oregon coast between Rocky Point and Coal Point, just south of the town of Port Orford," per Oregon's marine reserves program — 2.7 square miles of reserve with harvest restrictions in place since January 1, 2012, and a rule as short as Otter Rock's: "No take of animals or seaweeds. No ocean development." Rocky Point is the reserve's northern boundary, so if you work the rocks down that way, treat the shore as look-only and leave everything where it lives. The program's own suggestion for seeing the reserve is from above: "Visitors can find views overlooking the reserve from nearby parks at Port Orford Heads, Battle Rock, and Humbug Mountain."

Agate Beach is the north-of-town counterpart, reached through Tseriadun State Recreation Site at Garrison Lake — "open for day use year round," per Oregon State Parks, which counts "agate collectors" among the regulars and notes "there's a reason the community calls it Agate Beach." It's gravel-and-sand beachcombing ground rather than pool country; a few minutes further north, Paradise Point State Recreation Site earns the same billing — "The beach is great for beachcombing; it's not unusual to find floats and agates here." If the gravel is what you're after, the agate-hunting guide pairs these beaches with the winter windows that expose them.

What you'll find in the pools

When this guide was first written in July, recent research-grade iNaturalist reports within a few kilometers of the station totaled exactly two. The 60 days before October 11, 2026 look different: 15 research-grade observations across nine taxa, and the list is strikingly nudibranch-heavy — Spotted Dorid (Triopha maculata, 3 reports), Clown Dorid (Triopha catalinae, 2), Monterey Dorid (Doris montereyensis, 2), Nanaimo Dorid (Acanthodoris nanaimoensis, 2), and Horned Nudibranch (Hermissenda crassicornis, 2), plus single reports of White-lined Dirona, Noble Dorid, Gumboot Chiton (Cryptochiton stelleri), and California Mussel. Fifteen reports in two months is still a thin record for a shore beside a marine reserve closed to harvest since 2012 — but it is no longer blank, and the autumn skew toward sea slugs is the kind of detail only people with cameras at low tide produce.

Species reflect recent iNaturalist observations near the station (CC BY-NC, © the individual observers), a snapshot of the 60 days before 2026-10-11; NOAA is the tide-prediction data source. What you actually see on the rocks depends on the day.

Winter: the deepest dusk water in Oregon

From late October the deep water moves to dusk, and Port Orford's dusk runs deeper than anywhere else on the Oregon coast. The five lowest lows among daylight-overlap windows of the October 2026–March 2027 king season:

Computed from NOAA station 9431647 predictions; re-verified 2026-10-11. In the December run, the low itself arrives after dark — you work the falling tide in the last of the light.

The Christmas Eve row is the deepest low among daylight-overlap windows at any Oregon station this king season, but read its daylight column: 69 minutes, all at the front of a window that opens at 3:40 PM, with sunset at 4:48 PM and the −2.21 ft low not arriving until 6:14 — almost an hour and a half after dark. December 23 is the more usable sibling: light to about 4:48 PM against a 5:26 PM low.

The row worth circling is the last one. January 21, 2027 — a −1.89 ft low at 5:12 PM, four minutes before the 5:16 PM sunset — is the only window among the five season-lowest daylight-overlap lows at any of the four Oregon stations that reaches the Great band. The low arrives just before the light runs out: you get real depth and you get to see it, a combination the rest of the coast's king season never quite delivers. These dusk tides ride the same alignments as king tide season, when winter's highest highs drain to the year's lowest lows a few hours later.

How to work the window

For a morning low, use the arrive-by column: be on the rocks about an hour before the low and follow the water out, keeping your exit line in mind as it turns. These winter windows run the other way around: the lit minutes sit at the start, on the falling tide, and in most rows above the low itself arrives after dark — the usable light comes before the low, not around it. These are predictions, not observations; check conditions before you commit to a scramble, especially on a south-coast shore known for winter swell. None of the times in this guide verifies park hours, trail conditions, or how long a safe return takes — those are yours to confirm on the day.

One honesty note: station 9431647 sits at the port itself, in the cove sheltered by the Heads, and its predictions are the standard reference for this stretch of coast. Battle Rock Beach is essentially next door, but Agate Beach and Paradise Point are open shore a couple of miles north, so the exact minute of low water there can differ a little from the table — margin the arrive-by column already builds in.

The station page carries every computed window, the trip picker finds multi-day runs like December 20–24 automatically, and the Oregon minus-tide calendar puts Port Orford beside Garibaldi, Newport, and Charleston month by month. One town, one rock with a war named after it, a reserve nobody may harvest, and a shore whose thin record is finally growing — bring the camera and add to it.