Tide Chart

Here is the best tide chart I've found for the nearby area. But that does not give the Salt Pond tide.

Based on this analysis, the Salt Pond is roughly three hours behind the bay. The analysis goes like this. Consider small body of water connected to a large body through a variable-sized inlet

  1. If there is a wide inlet--limiting case being total attachment to the large body, then there is no resistance and the small body tide = the large body tide
  2. If there is a large constriction, then assume any starting condition for the small body: say the small body starts at the lowest tide level possible equal to the large body's lowest. Then at all times the large body tide is higher so the small body fills until comes to rough equilibrium at which time it will spends half its time filling and half its time emptying. This will happen when its mean level is roughly equal to the large body's mean level.
  3. Suppose it is at its mean level and the neck is very narrow, so that not much water flows in. Then the small body will never vary much from its mean level. In this case water flows in from the time the large body is at its mean level, and it will keep filling through high tide until the tide falls back to its mean level. At this point, the small body will start emptying. This means in this limiting case that the small body will be 90 degrees, or half a tidal swing, or roughly 3 hours 7 minutes behind the large body.
  4. So the limiting cases are: small body with a wide inlet: exactly in phase; small body with narrow inlet, 90 degrees out of phase. The exact phase angle will depend on the width of the inlet relative to the size of the small body.
For the Salt Pond the inlet is pretty small so I estimate that the tidal difference is around 3 hours.

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