Boracay (White Beach), Western Visayas tide times

Boracay is a thin seven-kilometre-long island off the north-west tip of Panay in the Visayan archipelago of the central Philippines, separated from the larger island by the narrow Tablas Strait. White Beach runs the entire west-facing flank of the island — four kilometres of fine coral sand divided into Stations 1, 2, and 3 by the local convention, with Cagban port on the south-east coast handling the bangka pump-boat shuttle from Caticlan on the Panay side. The tide here is a moderate mixed semidiurnal signal modulated by the Tablas Strait current that runs between Boracay and Carabao Island to the west.

6 on neaps. The pattern produces two highs and two lows of unequal size each day, with the difference between the higher high and the lower low varying through the lunar month and shifting toward strongly diurnal at certain phases. The Tablas Strait current can run sharper than the height swing implies, particularly through the narrow Cagban-Caticlan channel that the bangkas cross fifty times an hour during peak tourist season.

The defining seasonal force is the monsoon split. The amihan north-east monsoon from November through May drives steady wind across the island toward White Beach, calming the west-coast swell to glass and turning Bulabog Beach on the east side into one of the great kiteboarding venues of South-East Asia. The habagat south-west monsoon from June through October reverses the wind, opens the west coast to swell, and shifts the working windsurf and kite scene to the Bulabog east side which then sits in the lee of the island.

The 5 November 2013 Typhoon Haiyan track passed about 200 kilometres south of Boracay and the surge and wind damage were severe but well below the catastrophic levels at Tacloban and Guiuan further south-east. Sailing-sunset booking offices, the dive-boat operators running to Crocodile Island and Yapak Wall, the night-market food vendors at D'Mall, the local Ati community whose ancestral lands cover the inland forest, and the resident hermit crab and monitor lizard populations all read the table for different windows. The Philippine Coast Guard NAMRIA publishes the authoritative tide tables; Open-Meteo Marine drives the gridded predictions on this page.