Huntington Beach Tide Chart

Use this tide chart for Huntington Beach, California, anywhere along its open shore. The city’s beaches and Balboa Pier sit on one straight stretch of coast facing the open ocean, so the times here apply there with no correction.

Away from the surf, the tide keeps a different clock. NOAA derives all three of these points from one reference station, Los Angeles Outer Harbor, so their offsets can be compared directly. Just inside the Santa Ana River mouth, low tide comes about 1 hour 47 minutes after the Balboa Pier low and high tide about half an hour after it, and NOAA shrinks the heights sharply. At NOAA’s Los Patos highway bridge point, both high and low tide come a little over an hour after Balboa Pier. If you are on the water in a channel rather than on the beach, add that delay instead of using the times in the table as they are.

Behind the beach, the Bolsa Chica wetlands were reopened to the sea in 2006, when a restoration of nearly 600 acres cut a new inlet that lets the full tide into one of its basins. The inlet has to be kept open for the wetland to work. Mudflats that the tide now floods and drains feed migrating shorebirds, and a single count once found more than 10,000 of them; the project also built nesting sites for western snowy plovers and California least terns. None of the five NOAA prediction points nearest the city sits inside the reserve, so treat the times in the table as a guide to when the mudflats are covered, not as their exact schedule.