San Diego Tide Chart

The Cabrillo tide pools in San Diego lie on the ocean side of Point Loma, at the southern tip of the peninsula inside Cabrillo National Monument. From the main park road (Catalina Boulevard, also called Cabrillo Memorial Drive), Cabrillo Road winds down to the two lowest parking lots, and a short scramble over rock takes you to the water. The entrance fee covers the tide pools as well as the lighthouse area, and the city bus that serves the park stops short of the shore.

Check each low tide against the clock as well as the height. The park is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., but the tide pool area closes earlier, at 4:30 p.m., so a later window cannot be used here; the table above marks which windows fall inside those hours. The Park Service suggests a tide of 0.7 ft or lower for seeing the pools themselves, so aim for the very good days and for good ones under 0.7 ft. Those low tides tend to come in daylight in late fall and winter.

On weekends, holidays and the best low tides, rangers may close the road down to the shore for 30 to 45 minutes at a time when the lots fill. There is no phone signal at the pools, so if someone is picking you up, agree on a time and place before you go down; otherwise it is a steep walk of about a mile back up.

The Park Service describes the shore in three bands. Near the top, where the water reaches least often, are barnacles, limpets, chitons, mussels and crabs. Lower down come anemones, keyhole limpets and black tegula snails. Only the lowest tides expose the bottom band, with octopus, sea stars, nudibranchs, sea hares, spiny lobsters, urchins and fish, which is why the height of the low tide matters so much here.

Take nothing home: collecting any natural item is prohibited, whether a living animal, an empty shell or a rock (Park Service rules for the tide pools). Fishing is not allowed in the monument or in the Cabrillo State Marine Reserve next to it. Pets may come only as far as the Coastal Trail, not down to the pools.

For Point Loma tide pools in San Diego, CA, the downtown station is a poor stand-in: it sits deep inside the bay, while NOAA’s Point Loma point is out on the peninsula near the monument. For that point NOAA gives just the time and height of each high and low, worked out from the downtown predictions: lows come 2 minutes earlier and highs 9 minutes earlier, with heights scaled down slightly. Over 30 days of predictions from October 1, 2026, Point Loma’s low tides were never more than about 0.3 ft lower than downtown’s. That is enough to move a day across the 0.0 ft or 1.0 ft line, so the table and chart in this section follow Point Loma, and so does the tide pool sentence at the top of the page. The calendar further down is worked out from the downtown station, like the rest of the page, so its shading can differ slightly from this table.

For rocky shore north of the city, see La Jolla tide pools, which uses a station of its own.

Wear closed shoes with a grippy sole and stay on the marked paths down to the shore. Once on the rocks, keep facing the sea: a larger wave can run in well past the others without warning. Rangers lead walks on most low tides. If the uneven rock is not for you, the park shows a film about the pools in its auditorium instead.

These heights are for the downtown station, inside the bay. The City of San Diego has filmed what a king tide can do on land: a stretch of Midway Drive that the city says goes under regularly during king tides. Its time-lapse ran from January 28 to February 2, 2022. Use the Light column above if you want to see the water at its peak in daylight.