Last night was a Blue Moon. That's when there's a second full moon in a calendar month. The combination of the sun and the moon being in alignment causes a greater gravitational pull on the earth and results in the highest tides of the month Of course, it also produces the lowest tides of the month too. This morning I got up to an unusually still boat. The goose wasn’t rocking at all. Normally if the wind is blowing she will move ever so slightly but this morning nothing, we were rock steady. I popped my head out to look around and saw this vista and realized that the low tide has left us stranded at the dock. In fact over the next hour the nose slowly dropped and we ended up about 4 inches out of the water.
Just to give you some Idea of the amount of water that is being moved in and out at this time of the month….
The bay is roughly 100 sq mi in size. (A sq mi. has about 220 million gal. of water) so this is roughly 22 Billion gal./ foot of depth and the tide moves about 3 feet in (or out) over a 12 hour period therefore, about 65 billion gal. of water drained out of the bay over night. WOW! (in comparison, if the Muskegon navigational channel flowed at about .5 mph of current and it was roughly 500 feet wide x30 feet deep it would move a little under 4 Billion gal/ 12 hours.
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