Port Aransas, TX tide times

Port Aransas sits at the north end of Mustang Island, on the Texas coastal bend roughly halfway between Galveston and the mouth of the Rio Grande. The town occupies the south side of Aransas Pass, the inlet connecting Corpus Christi Bay and Aransas Bay to the open Gulf of Mexico. The pass is the working entrance for the Port of Corpus Christi shipping channel — one of the busiest energy-export ports in the United States — and the local culture is a mix of charter fishing, tanker traffic, and barrier-island tourism in a way no other Texas town quite replicates.

The tide here is the standard small Gulf diurnal signal, with one important quirk: Port Aransas has one of the smallest mean tidal ranges of any continuously monitored US coastal gauge. Mean range at the Port Aransas station is about 0.27 metres above MLLW, with a great diurnal range of 0.32 metres on the bigger days. Most days produce one high and one low spaced roughly 24 hours apart, and on the moon's quarter phases the pattern can briefly go mixed diurnal. Wind tides regularly exceed the astronomical signal — south winds piling Gulf water into the bay system can raise the pass and bay levels by 0.4 metres or more, north winds drain them by similar amounts, and the wind direction matters more than the tide table for many local activities.

Aransas Pass is the geographic and economic spine of Port Aransas. The pass is dredged and jettied for the federal channel into Corpus Christi Bay, which then connects to Corpus Christi Ship Channel and the Port of Corpus Christi 30 kilometres inland. Tidal current through the throat reaches 2 knots on the ebb despite the tiny tidal range, because the bay system on the inside is so much larger than the channel cross-section at the pass. The South Jetty (the Mustang Island side) is a 2-kilometre rock structure walkable to its end via a maintained surface and a small fishing pier at the tip; it is the most heavily used shore-fishing structure on the Texas coast. Tarpon, snook, redfish, pompano, Spanish and king mackerel, jack crevalle, and the occasional cobia all stage on the jetty rocks and the channel edges. The free passenger ferry connects Port Aransas to the mainland at Aransas Pass town across a 200-metre stretch of channel.

The Gulf-facing beach on Mustang Island runs south from the jetties for the full length of the island, with public driving access along most of the stretch (Texas open-beach tradition). Spring breakers, surf fishers, and family beachgoers all use the same sand. Mustang Island State Park sits 8 kilometres south of town and protects 8 kilometres of undeveloped beach and dune system. The bay side of the island is shallow, salty (the upper Laguna Madre is hyperhaline), and supports the seagrass beds that produce world-class kayak fishing for redfish.

The University of Texas Marine Science Institute is on the bay side of Port Aransas and operates a free public-access aquarium and visitor centre. The town is also the wintering destination for whooping cranes from the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge across the bay; charter ecotour boats from the harbour run November through March to view the cranes on the refuge tidal flats. Port Aransas hosts the Texas International Fishing Tournament and a year-round charter fleet running for offshore species from the working harbour at the marina.

Predictions on this page come from NOAA CO-OPS station 8775237 (harmonic predictions, accurate to within minutes), with the Port Isabel reference station 8779770 controlling the harmonic constants. Hurricane Harvey made landfall here on 25 August 2017 with surge of roughly 4 metres above MLLW, and the rebuilt town infrastructure reflects that lesson.