Seattle's 2026 tidepool season is over. The year's last daylight minus tides at NOAA station 9447130 ran September 8–10, bottoming at −1.02 ft MLLW on Tuesday the 8th; every minus tide left in 2026 happens after dark, and no daylight minus tide returns until February 15, 2027 — a −0.47 ft low at 5:52 PM, right at dusk. The place to keep on the list for next season is Constellation Park on the south side of Alki Point, where the Seattle Aquarium says pooling is best when the tide is below 2 feet; the first Exceptional windows of 2027 land the weekend of April 10–11.
Puget Sound is generous with daylight low water in summer and stingy the rest of the year. By mid-September the deep lows slide into the night, and from October through December every minus tide at the Seattle station happens in darkness. The 2026 season is now closed.
Constellation Park at a glance
- Where: the south side of Alki Point in West Seattle, at 3521 Beach Drive SW — signed as Charles Richey Sr. Viewpoint — with a small marine reserve at the end of 63rd Ave SW.
- Tide station: NOAA Seattle station 9447130; live windows and seven-day high/low tables are on the Seattle station page.
- When it's worth going: the Seattle Aquarium says the park "is best for tide pooling when the tide level is below 2 feet," and "the eelgrass beds are visible on tides less than 1 foot."
- Footing: the shore "is characterized by large cobble, which is often covered in slippery algae" — the Aquarium's words. Test rocks before you commit your weight.
- Parking and restrooms: "There is no parking lot at this location" and "There are no public restrooms at this park" — free street parking only; the nearest restrooms are at Alki Beach, about a 7-minute drive north.
How the season ended: September 8–10
Tidewindow computes windows for the West Seattle and Ballard beaches from the NOAA Seattle station (9447130). Here is how 2026 closed out:
| Date | Low (ft MLLW) | Time of low | Tide window | Arrive by | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tue, Sep 8 | −1.02 | 9:12 AM | 7:25 AM–11:05 AM | 8:12 AM | 68 (Good) |
| Wed, Sep 9 | −0.86 | 10:04 AM | 8:30 AM–11:45 AM | 9:04 AM | 65 (Good) |
| Thu, Sep 10 | −0.35 | 10:51 AM | 9:30 AM–12:10 PM | 9:51 AM | 52 (Fair) |
Computed 2026-09-08 from NOAA station 9447130 predictions, MLLW. Scores (0–100) weigh tide depth and daylight together.
These were modest lows next to July's monsters, but they cleared the Seattle Aquarium's "below 2 feet" tide-pooling bar — and its "less than 1 foot" eelgrass bar — comfortably, and they landed at very civilized mid-morning hours. One footnote: Friday, September 11 had a +0.5 ft low at 11:34 AM, which still technically cleared both Aquarium bars for a shorter, shallower look, but it was not a minus tide and our scoring rated the window Skip.
Where to go: Constellation Park and Alki
The best pools in Seattle proper are at Constellation Park, also signed as Charles Richey Sr. Viewpoint, on the south-facing side of Alki Point at 3521 Beach Drive SW. The Seattle Aquarium's beach guide describes its "two large rock lines where you can find sea stars, anemones, barnacles, crabs and algae," and calls it "a great location to take any age group tide pooling because there is lots of room to explore the intertidal." The parks page notes the shoreline here also takes in a small marine reserve at the end of 63rd Ave SW.
Two practical notes the Aquarium is explicit about: "There is no parking lot at this location" — free street parking only, so mind the driveways — and "There are no public restrooms at this park," the nearest being back at Alki Beach about a 7-minute drive north. Alki Beach itself, on the north side of the point, is the sandier, more developed side with restrooms and food, and works as a family basecamp on the same tides.
At the north end of the city, Golden Gardens in Ballard is the sandy-shore alternative on this station — gentler footing, easier for small kids. For the rockiest pools and the widest exposed rock, though, Constellation Park is the one worth the drive.
The Puget Sound advantage: midday lows
If you have read our dawn-lows guide, you know the open Pacific coast forces its best summer tidepoolers out of bed before sunrise. Puget Sound does not. The Sound's tide is offset from the outer coast, so its deepest daylight lows land in late morning and midday — the 2026 finale came at 9:12, 10:04, and 10:51 AM. That is the quiet luxury of tidepooling in the city: you can have coffee first.
When do the low tides come back?
Not this year. October has a couple of shallow daylight windows but zero daylight minus tides; in November and December the Seattle station has no daylight low-tide windows at all — the deep lows all run at night. What the dark months bring instead is king tide season: the winter's highest morning highs here top out at 13.09 ft MLLW on January 25, 2027, with the Christmas-week peak just behind at 13.01 ft on December 26.
The daylight lows return in 2027 on the spring schedule, which in Puget Sound means afternoons:
- First daylight minus tide: Monday, February 15, 2027 — −0.47 ft at 5:52 PM, right at dusk. A technicality more than an outing.
- First workable runs: mid-March 2027, with Good-rated afternoon windows March 13–14 (−0.47 ft and −0.55 ft, lows at 2:18 and 4:12 PM).
- First Exceptional windows: the weekend of April 10–11, 2027 — −1.92 ft at 2:02 PM Saturday (score 94) and −1.80 ft at 2:52 PM Sunday (92).
- The real deep water: May 7–9, 2027, bottoming at −3.18 ft on Saturday, May 8.
Computed 2026-09-08 from NOAA station 9447130 predictions, MLLW.
How 2026 played out
For the record — and for calibrating what a big Seattle year looks like — here are the eight deepest daylight lows Tidewindow computed for 2026 (records begin July 1; by fall the deep lows had all slid into darkness):
| Rank | Date | Low (ft MLLW) | Time of low | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tue, Jul 14 | −3.80 | 11:20 AM | 90 |
| 2 | Mon, Jul 13 | −3.68 | 10:31 AM | 90 |
| 3 | Wed, Jul 15 | −3.49 | 12:08 PM | 90 |
| 4 | Sun, Jul 12 | −3.16 | 9:40 AM | 100 |
| 5 | Thu, Jul 16 | −2.73 | 12:55 PM | 90 |
| 6 | Tue, Aug 11 | −2.63 | 10:19 AM | 90 |
| 7 | Wed, Aug 12 | −2.48 | 11:07 AM | 90 |
| 8 | Mon, Aug 10 | −2.40 | 9:26 AM | 90 |
Computed 2026-09-08 from NOAA station 9447130 predictions, MLLW.
The five deepest all fell inside one July week — the July 12–16 run rated Exceptional every day, with the year-best score of 100 on Sunday the 12th (−3.16 ft in full mid-morning light on a weekend) and the deepest water on Tuesday the 14th. Independent corroboration that the numbers were real: the West Seattle Blog's beach-naturalist calendar listed Monday the 13th as "a −3.7-foot low-low tide at 10:30 am," essentially our computed −3.68 ft at 10:31 AM. The West Coast minus-tide roundup covered how that same new moon ran the tide out from Washington to California, and the two nearest sibling guides — Port Townsend up the Sound and La Push on the outer coast — ran their own Exceptional stretches on those dates. August added one last Exceptional run on the 10th–12th. By month: Seattle logged 20 daylight minus tides in July, 13 in August, and 6 in September — then zero for the rest of the year.
What you'll find in the pools
The last two months of community observations logged within a few kilometers of the station lean heavily toward sea slugs. The most-reported animal is the Horned Nudibranch (Hermissenda crassicornis), a small striped sea slug, followed by the White-lined Dirona (Dirona albolineata) and the White-and-orange-tipped Nudibranch (Antiopella fusca). Rounding out the list are the Rough Keyhole Limpet (Diodora aspera), the Woody Chiton (Mopalia lignosa), the Monterey Dorid (Doris montereyensis), the Frilled Dogwinkle (Nucella lamellosa), the swimming Hooded Nudibranch (Melibe leonina), and the Lined Chiton (Tonicella lineata). The Aquarium's own beach list adds ochre sea stars, gunnels, hermit crabs, and — on the deepest lows — octopuses tucked inside an old pipe on the beach.
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.
Beach naturalists: season wrapped
The Seattle Aquarium Beach Naturalist program puts trained volunteers on the shore during the summer's biggest lows to, in the Aquarium's words, "educate members of the public on how to explore shorelines while keeping animals and their homes safe." The 2026 season's posted dates ran from May through July — including Golden Gardens and Lincoln Park in West Seattle — so the naturalist calendar is wrapped until next summer. If you are planning to bring kids in 2027, Tidepooling With Kids has the checklist, the rules, and the family-friendly habits the naturalists teach.
How to work a window
Use the arrive-by time, not the low time — get onto the beach about an hour ahead so you can follow the water out to the lowest rocks as it drops; the one-hour rule, and why Puget Sound's "best time" runs later in the day than the outer coast's, is covered in The Best Time to Go Tide Pooling. The footing is the real hazard here: the Aquarium notes Constellation Park "is characterized by large cobble, which is often covered in slippery algae," so step deliberately and test rocks before you commit your weight. Watch the tide turn and start back before it fills in behind you. Shallower lows expose less rock than the deep spring-tide runs do, so on a modest window the pools that matter are the ones closest to the waterline — all the more reason to be there when it bottoms out.
The other rule is for the animals, not you. Look, lift gently, and put everything back exactly as you found it — every rock you turn is the ceiling of someone's home, and an overturned rock left flipped cooks the life underneath. Leave the creatures where they live. That is the whole ethic the beach naturalists are there to model.
For the day-by-day view, the year heatmap shows how empty the calendar runs until spring, and the trip picker finds multi-day runs automatically — point it at spring 2027. Chasing light as much as water? The golden-hour calendar flags the days when the low and the low sun line up. And for the wider Puget Sound picture across stations, the Puget Sound low-tide calendar puts Seattle next to Port Townsend and the rest of the Sound. One season down; the next cracks open at a February dusk and gets serious on the April 10–11 weekend.