Port Townsend Tide Chart 2026: Low Tide Schedule & Tide Pools at Fort Worden and North Beach

Port Townsend's daylight tide-pool season has closed for 2026. The September 5–10 run — peaking on Labor Day, September 7, at −1.11 ft MLLW, 7:20 AM, scored 80/100 — was the year's last good one at NOAA station 9444900. Exactly four daylight windows remain in 2026, all marginal; the deepest is October 5, −0.23 ft at 5:48 AM (score 27, Skip). The complete tide chart — every predicted high and low through October 31 — is in the table below.

This page is now the season's record and its closing arithmetic: what the last run delivered, the handful of marginal mornings still on the books, and when the water and the light next meet. The beaches themselves — Fort Worden, North Beach, Point Wilson — aren't going anywhere, and neither is the practical detail further down.

What's left in 2026: four marginal windows

This is the complete list of remaining 2026 daylight-eligible windows at Port Townsend (9444900) — every window from September 18 onward with at least 30 minutes of daylight overlap, not a selection.

Computed 2026-09-18 from NOAA station 9444900 predictions, MLLW. "Daylight in window" is the overlap between the below-+1-ft window and daylight; a window qualifies here at ≥30 minutes of overlap, which is not the same thing as the low itself being in daylight.

Read the fine print before setting an alarm. October 5 is the only minus tide in the set, but its 39 daylight minutes all come at the tail of the window — sunrise falls around 7:16 AM, so the 5:48 AM low itself lands in the dark, and the arrive-by time of 4:48 AM is earlier than either of Fort Worden's posted openings. On September 22 and October 7 the low does sit in daylight, but at +0.90 and +0.88 ft the shore barely opens beyond an ordinary low. None of these is a trip-worthy tide-pool morning; they're what the Skip band is for. The October calendar has every window of that month if you want to see the arithmetic yourself.

November and December each record 22 lows below +1 ft and zero daylight windows: every one of those lows lands after dark. That is not a data gap — it is the Sound's rhythm. The next time low water and daylight overlap here is the winter king-tide season, at dusk rather than dawn: the deepest is −1.64 ft at 7:06 PM on Wednesday, February 17, 2027, a Fair-band window in the last of the evening light, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Monday — January 18, 2027 — brings −1.46 ft at 6:32 PM. For morning tide pooling, the season reopens in spring.

If your dates are flexible, the Tide Window Finder will check any day against the station's predictions, the trip picker finds multi-day runs, and the year heatmap shows just how empty the back half of this calendar is.

Port Townsend tide chart: October 2026 (and the rest of September)

The table below is the complete tide chart for station 9444900 from September 20 through October 31 — the full low tide schedule and the highs, every predicted extreme, not just the four qualifying windows above. Times are local; heights are feet above MLLW, so a negative low means water below the average lowest tide line. Depth alone doesn't make a tide-pool morning — How Low Does the Tide Need to Be for Tide Pools? works through that — and here the catch is starker still: this table's deep lows all land in the dark.

Computed 2026-09-20 from NOAA station 9444900 predictions, MLLW.

Read the timestamps before the depths. Within this range the station records 18 minus tides, and every one of them lands between 10:15 PM and 5:48 AM — deep in the night or, at best, well before sunrise. The deepest is −2.77 ft at 12:19 AM on Thursday, October 29, and the same date carries the range's highest water, +9.03 ft at 8:41 AM. That pairing — the deepest low and the highest high riding the same new moon — is the alignment behind the season's king tides; the 2026–2027 king tide calendar tracks the high end of the same curve. Of everything in this table, only the four windows in the section above clear the 30-minute daylight-overlap bar.

The Puget Sound low tide calendar sets these numbers beside Seattle's, day for day. Live charts with the daylight-window math attached are on this station's monthly calendar pages — September 2026 and October 2026 — and the station page always shows the next seven days of highs and lows.

The Labor Day run, for the record: September 5–10, 2026

The year's last real run went exactly as predicted. Here is how it lined up, day by day.

Computed from NOAA station 9444900 predictions, MLLW; preserved as a record of the run. Scores (0–100) weigh tide depth and daylight together; the methodology page shows how.

The depths across Saturday through Tuesday were nearly identical — all within a tenth of a foot of −1 ft — so daylight, not depth, decided the ranking. Saturday's low landed roughly an hour and a half before sunrise; Sunday's about twenty minutes before sunup. Monday was the first morning the low itself sat in daylight, which is why Labor Day, at a civilized 7:20 AM, took the top score even though it beat Sunday's depth by only a few hundredths of a foot. That the deepest, best-lit morning of the run fell on the holiday Monday was a genuine gift of the calendar.

It was also a Puget-Sound-only event: the same new moon pulled the outer coast's lows back before dawn, so Port Townsend and the inland stations got the last usable run of the year to themselves. The Puget Sound low tide calendar compares the season across the Sound's stations; in all, September held 8 daylight windows and 6 daylight minus tides here, and the September calendar keeps every one of them.

For the record: the July 11–16 Exceptional run

The year's headline event is further back still, but it is worth keeping the numbers, because they show what this station can do. The July 11–16, 2026 run was Exceptional (90+) every single day, with the two deepest daylight lows in the station's 2026 dataset (which begins July 1) — −3.48 ft MLLW — landing back-to-back on Monday the 13th and Tuesday the 14th.

Computed 2026-07-06 from NOAA station 9444900 predictions; preserved as a record of the run.

Set against that, September's −1.11 ft was modest — about 2.4 ft less draw-down than July's deepest. The right way to read the comparison isn't regret; it's that Port Townsend concentrates almost everything into two mid-summer moons, hands out one gentler holiday-weekend encore in early September, and then closes for the winter. The West Coast roundup from that July week shows how the same run swept the whole coast.

Where to go at Fort Worden

The Port Townsend prediction station sits right off Fort Worden Historical State Park, and the park is where most people work these tides. The shoreline to explore is the park's north-facing, cobble-and-sand stretch along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which opens up on a deep low. The Point Wilson shoreline wraps around to the lighthouse at the park's northeast tip. (Washington State Parks notes that "though Point Wilson is only accessible through the park, it is not located on state parks land" — the lighthouse itself is federal.) Fort Worden also houses a natural history museum and aquarium that are part of the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, if you want to put names to what you find.

Two practical notes before you go. A Discover Pass is required for vehicle access to Fort Worden, as at all Washington state parks — $10 for a one-day pass or $45 for the annual, per Washington State Parks. And the park publishes day-use hours — 6:30 a.m. to dusk in summer, 8 a.m. to dusk in winter — so on this station's early windows the gate, not just the tide, is a clock: check the current posted hours against the arrive-by time before committing to a dawn start.

North Beach: the county park next door

The beach most of these windows point at is locally called North Beach, and it has its own front door: North Beach Park, a Jefferson County day-use park — not part of the state park — that adjoins Fort Worden on the Strait side. The county describes it as "one of the few public access beaches on the north end of the Quimper Peninsula" and "an excellent beachcombers' starting point for walks in either direction," and lists a mowed grass area, restrooms, a picnic shelter, water and parking on its one acre of waterfront. Both lots open onto the same shoreline, so you can start from either and walk the same beach; the county's page does not publish hours for its lot, so check signage there.

One boundary worth keeping: the tide predictions above say what the water will do, not what any route allows. Walking west from North Beach toward Glass Beach is a much longer, tide-dependent shoreline route with its own published guidance — the Glass Beach tide guide covers it and is careful to distinguish station windows from route access. Don't stretch a Skip-band window into a point-to-point walk.

What you'll find in the pools

The last 60 days of community observations logged within a few kilometers of the station now lead with Nuttall's Cockle (Clinocardium nuttallii), with the Gumboot Chiton (Cryptochiton stelleri) — the largest chiton in the world, a leathery brick-red slab that can reach a foot long — a close second and the Mossy Chiton (Mopalia muscosa) third. Alongside them, observers have logged the Pacific Oyster, the nudibranchs Monterey Dorid and White-lined Dirona, the Shield Limpet and Fingered Limpet, and two dogwinkles — Channeled and Frilled (Nucella canaliculata, N. lamellosa). The Sound's cobble beaches hide as much as any rocky reef — you just have to look under and between.

Species reflect recent iNaturalist observations near the station (CC BY-NC, © the individual observers); NOAA is the tide-prediction data source. What you actually see depends on the day.

How to work a window

Use the arrive-by time in the tables, not the low time — the National Park Service's tidepooling guidance puts it plainly: "Be at the tidepool area at least an hour before low tide so that you have plenty of time to explore safely while the water is receding," and "Return no later than an hour after the tide has begun to rise."

Footing is the real hazard, not the water depth. NPS notes that reaching the intertidal zone "requires travel over sand, slippery rocks covered with algae, and pools of water with depths of a foot or more," and advises "comfortable shoes that can get wet and still give good traction." And leave the beach as you found it: "Do not disturb tidal pools, marine animals, or other wildlife. If you do handle an organism (again, please don't), return it to the location that you found it." Turn rocks back the way they were lying — the underside is someone's roof.

The alarm-setting advice, for now, is that there's no alarm to set: 2026 has given Port Townsend what it's going to. The next date worth circling is at the other end of the day — February 17, 2027, −1.64 ft in the last of the evening light — and the Tide Window Finder will be holding the station's predictions in the meantime.