Langkawi tide times

Langkawi is the largest of a 99-island archipelago in the Andaman Sea off the northwestern coast of Peninsular Malaysia, sitting in Kedah state about 30 kilometres from the Thai border. The archipelago is a mix of limestone karst, granite headlands, and mangrove-lined channels, and the coast is more directly exposed to the open Andaman Sea than the sheltered George Town side of the Strait of Malacca to the south. That exposure shows up in the tide signature.

5 on neaps. Two highs and two lows about twelve and a half hours apart, with the swing meaningfully larger than Penang's because the Andaman exposure carries more open-ocean tidal energy than the funnelled strait. Kuah jetty on the southeastern coast of Pulau Langkawi is the main ferry hub, handling the high-speed boats from Kuala Perlis on the Kedah mainland and the longer crossing from Penang.

Cargo and yacht traffic share the Kuah anchorage with the local fishing fleet, and the night ferry departures from Kuala Perlis time their arrivals to favourable tide for the Kuah berth. The eastern coast of the island runs into the Kilim Geoforest Park, where the limestone karst lagoons and mangrove channels are tidally driven — the eagle-feeding tour boats, the bat-cave at Gua Kelawar, and the longtail-boat passages through the karst all work the rising and falling water. Some of the lagoon entrances are passable only at half-tide and above, and the boat captains read the daily prediction the way bus drivers read a route timetable.

The Tanjung Rhu mangrove channels at the northeastern tip of the island run a similar pattern, with the longtail and kayak operators timing their inner-channel passes to the rising water. On the western coast, Pantai Cenang is the main beach strip and the local sailing and parasailing centre; the wide gentle sand reveals about 50 to 80 metres of shore exposure between high and low water on a typical spring tide, and the late-afternoon low-tide window is when the hawker stalls and beach restaurants set up the widest perimeter on the open sand. Pulau Dayang Bunting, the second-largest island in the archipelago south of Pulau Langkawi, contains the Lake of the Pregnant Maiden — a freshwater lake separated from the sea by a thin limestone wall, reachable only by boat from Pantai Cenang or Kuah, and the boat operators time the crossing to favourable tide and wind across the open channel between the islands.

The Mahsuri tomb at Kampung Mawat is one of the oldest cultural sites on the island, a memorial to the legendary 18th-century princess whose curse local lore credits with seven generations of misfortune that the island only began shedding in the modern era. The Telaga Tujuh seven-wells waterfall on the northwestern coast feeds the same forest river system that drains to the western beaches at low tide. Anglers work the channel between Pulau Tuba and Pulau Dayang Bunting for grouper and snapper on the change of tide, and the Pulau Payar Marine Park snorkelling reefs about 30 km south of Langkawi are tide-sensitive: the boat operators target the slack-water windows between flood and ebb when the visibility on the reef peaks.

Shore foragers along the Seberang Perai mudflats opposite to the eastern coast walk the exposed banks at spring lows for clams and the same tropical mud crabs that the western Penang coast is known for. The predictions on this page come from Open-Meteo Marine, a free gridded global ocean model. The model estimates tidal height from oceanographic equations applied across a geographic grid rather than from harmonic analysis of a measured gauge record.

3 metres on height — small relative to Langkawi's two-and-a-half metre mean swing. For navigation-grade tide data, the Department of Survey and Mapping Malaysia (JUPEM) and the National Hydrographic Centre publish the authoritative Malaysian tide tables for the Andaman Sea coast.