Tamarindo tide times

Tamarindo sits on the northern Pacific coast of Costa Rica in Guanacaste province, a working surf town that grew out of a small fishing village at the mouth of the Tamarindo estuary. The coast here faces the open Pacific without significant offshore islands or shelter, which means the swell rolls in clean from the southwest in the green season from May through November and from the northwest in the dry season from December through April. The tide here is mixed semidiurnal with a large range typical of the eastern tropical Pacific.

2. Two highs and two lows of unequal size each day, about twelve and a half hours apart, with the bigger swing typically falling on the lower-low water. The wide range reshapes the working day for everyone on this coast.

The Tamarindo estuary at the south end of the main beach drains a tidal lagoon system behind the town and the Las Baulas leatherback nesting beach across the river mouth at Playa Grande. At low water the estuary becomes a wide sand-and-mangrove flat that the local panga skippers cross on foot or by paddle — at high water the same channel is a working boat road for fishing and tour traffic. The estuary is also working saltwater crocodile habitat, and the local advice on the foot-crossing is consistent year after year: take the boat.

The Las Baulas leatherback nesting season runs from October through February, and the female turtles haul out on the high tide of the night cycle to lay their eggs above the spring high-water mark; the research crews from the Las Baulas national marine park time their patrols to the predicted high of the night and the volunteer monitoring teams read the same prediction for shift planning. The crossing to Playa Grande from Tamarindo is by boat at most stages of the tide and on foot only at the lowest spring lows. South of Tamarindo, Playa Langosta runs roughly two kilometres of broken rocky shelf and headland tide pools that reveal at low water — the same flat that surfers paddle out across in the morning becomes a tide-pool walking circuit in the evening on a low spring tide, and the Río San Francisco mouth at the southern end of Playa Langosta is a snook-and-corvina estuary that the local anglers work on the changing water.

The Tamarindo break itself runs at most stages of the tide but is cleanest on the rising tide from low to mid; the river-mouth peak at the southern end works on the dropping tide from mid to low. The reef break at Henry's Point on the northern headland reads the same swing. Sport-fishing pangas running out of the river mouth target dorado and roosterfish on the offshore current, and the inshore estuary anglers read the rising tide for snook and corvina.

Beach-walking families work the morning low for the wet-sand expanse on the main beach, and shorebird photographers target the falling tide when the willets, sanderlings, and wood storks work the receding waterline for crustaceans. The dawn and dusk colour windows during a low-water spring align with the longest reflective wet-sand expanse, and local landscape photographers know the cycle. The predictions on this page come from Open-Meteo Marine, a free gridded global ocean model.

3 metres on height — small relative to Tamarindo's two-and-a-half metre mean range but worth knowing when planning around the night nesting tide or the lowest spring lows. The Costa Rican Instituto Geográfico Nacional and Universidad de Costa Rica's Centro de Investigación en Ciencias del Mar y Limnología (CIMAR) are the regional authoritative references; Puerto Caldera port operations south at the entrance to the Gulf of Nicoya provide the authoritative regional gauge data.