Simple Tides / Guides / Southern California Tides

Southern California Tides

Southern California sees a classic mixed semidiurnal tide — two highs and two lows a day, usually noticeably different in size from each other — and it shapes everything from surf conditions to one of the coast's strangest natural events.

The pattern

Expect a range of roughly 5–7 feet along most of the SoCal coast, with the classic West Coast mixed pattern where one daily high is clearly bigger than the other, and same for the lows. That asymmetry is worth knowing before you check a tide chart for the first time here — see our guide to reading a tide chart if the shape looks unfamiliar.

Surfing and tide

Southern California's famous points and reef breaks (Malibu, Rincon, Trestles, and dozens more) are each known locally for a "best" tide stage, since the same swell can look completely different over a reef at low tide versus high — see our guide to tide and surf quality.

Tide pooling

The rocky points around Laguna Beach, Palos Verdes, and Cabrillo National Monument are some of the best-known tide pooling spots on the West Coast, best visited on the lowest tides of the month.

Grunion runs

Southern California beaches host one of the coast's most unusual natural events: grunion runs, where small silver fish ride the waves onto the sand at night to spawn, timed closely to the nights just after the highest high tides around full and new moons — the same spring tide pattern covered elsewhere on this site, applied to fish behavior instead of water height.

Find stations up and down the SoCal coast on the Simple Tides map.