Munster

Ireland's south coast — Munster — stretches from the Waterford coast in the east, past Cork's deep inlets and headlands, to the Beara and Dingle peninsulas in the west. The defining feature is Cork Harbour, one of the largest natural harbours in the world: a flooded river valley 25 kilometres deep, sheltered enough to have served as a trans-Atlantic departure point for over a century of emigrant ships. RMS Titanic made her final port call at Cobh (then Queenstown) on 11 April 1912, taking on 123 passengers before steaming southwest. The tides here are semidiurnal — two highs and two lows every 24 hours 50 minutes — with a mean range of around 3.6 metres above Lowest Astronomical Tide at Cork. That puts Munster in the mesotidal-to-macrotidal bracket: enough rise and fall to expose broad mudflats inside the harbour at low water, strand dinghies in tidal creeks, and push useful currents through the harbour entrance at Roches Point. South of Cork, the coastline breaks into a series of ria-style inlets — Kinsale, Courtmacsherry, Clonakilty — each with their own drying ground at the head. Charter fishing boats out of Kinsale work the water column across the full tidal cycle; commercial crabbers time their hauls to the ebb. Further west, Dingle Bay opens to the full Atlantic swell fetch. The water is green, cold, and productive. Marine Institute Ireland buoy data and UKHO Irish Sea charts are the authoritative references for passage planning on this coast.