I worked for two years renting out beach umbrellas and chairs at Assateague State Park for two summers in high school. I would walk out to the beach and set up my little stand next to a fence used to protect the dunes from wandering beach-goers. Assateague has a very large sandbar and some days I would be able to walk very far out at low tide without going in the water. This obviously made problems for my business because often people wanted to get as close to the water with their rented equipment, which would then be quickly submerged by the rising tide through the day. These days of very strong tidal differences were caused by “spring tides” which are caused by the Sun, Moon, and Earth in a line. The greater force causes a noticeably higher high tide along the plane, and in turn a lower low tide perpendicular to this plane.
The opposite, when the Earth’s focal point creates a right angle between the Sun and Moon, is known as a “neap tide”. These tides are almost half the strength of spring tides, which was very nice for the beach rental business because people tended to choose spots that would not be overtaken by the tides throughout the day. An interesting note, in many areas surfers prefer the spring tide because it tends to create much larger waves, but at Assateague the sandbar is so large that it creates an amplified wave space during neap tides.
