Some messed up sh*t

If you've ever had a sea urchin stuck in your finger, you too will become more careful in planning your swims according to tide charts. The spines of a seaurchin lodge themselves deeply in your flesh, even if you've just brushed them slightly. They are pretty hard to get out. I rubbed red onion juice over my pinkie because I couldn't surgically remove them without making a mess of my finger. The red onion eased the swelling.

I've seen many seaurchins before but this one happened a while back and I was a newbie so to speak. It was afternoon and I was swimming into shore with some waves and surf pushing me in, when I noticed with some consternation that I was swimming right over a bed of seaurchins. And just then it was too late already.

If you're in Kuta, don't follow the tourist guidebooks' advice on swimming schedules. A lot of tourist guidebooks will tell you that the best times to swim in Kuta bay, Tanjuan or Mawun are the morning hours til noon. They say that's when the water-level is up. Now that is non-sense. There can be low tides at any time of the day. It depends on the moon phase, the position of the sun and rotation of the earth, and the shape of the ocean floor. Most places around the world experience 2 high tides and 2 low tides a day (semidiurnal) or 1 high tide and 1 low tide a day (diurnal). These tides follow a schedule of about 6 hour shifts. But not exactly 6 hours.

See, the moon orbits the Earth at the same times as the Earth rotates on its axis, so it takes slightly more than a day—about 24 hours and 50 minutes—for the Moon to return to the same position in the sky. This is why semidiurnal and diurnal tides come in with a bit of delay, like 6 hours and some squeezed minutes or 12 hours and some minutes. During the course of a year, high and low tide will pass through every hour of the day. Saying that there is always low-tide in one place before noon all year round is rubbish.

That's the clue, especially in Kuta Lombok, it's really messed up here, but I can't tell you why. Magicseaweed, the trusted surfer website that most people here consult, also doesn't think there are static tides. However, they suggest that Kuta Lombok, unlike Kuta Bali or other places, goes through irregular tide shifts which are neither diurnal nor semidiurnal tides but "mixed tides", with sometimes 10 hour shifts and more! Based on my experience of swimming in Kuta, the tide predictions on Magicseaweed aren't spot-on for Kuta-Lombok exactly, so I look at tide charts for Bali too and concoct my own ideas of tides down here.

I talked to a dive operator and they didn't know why it was all so weird either. Don't trust the guidebooks. Don't trust anyone.