I Can’t Sail or Surf, Yet I’m Obsessed With the Apple Watch’s New Tides App

Out of high school, I became enamored by Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series of Napoleonic-era sailing novels. He captured a beautiful sense of time and place better than any other historical epic of the last century. O’Brian made me fall in love with the idea of ship-based life, that sense of adventure and beauty of life bounding along the waves. The Apple Watch Ultra 2 and watchOS 11’s Tides app brought that wistfulness for the waves back in a surprisingly organic way. 

Remember the excellent 2003 historical drama Master and Commander? The movie is based on these novels. In O’Brian’s series, Captain Jack Aubrey is a portly yet gregarious lifelong sailor whose being is wholly beholden to the Royal Navy. He is constantly obsessed with timeliness, often exclaiming, “Not a moment to be lost” to anyone in earshot. He obsesses about the state of the tides, something which his friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin, cannot possibly understand. Maturin lives life as languidly as the unhurried natural world he so loves to catalog. He is often late to rendezvous despite Aubrey’s constant worry he’ll miss the tide that will take him out to sea.

So you understand, I look at the new Tides app on my Apple Watch Ultra 2 with a sense of longing. I cannot stand to be aboard a ship. I get seasick as soon as a vessel of any size starts to roll with the calmest surf. I can only stand on the ocean’s edge, whether at the Rockaways or Jones Beach, the rip tide burying my feet up to my ankles in wet sand, imagining what it’s like to stand on a deck with gleaming sails fluttering above my head.

The Tides app on Apple Watch is very simple. You can see the expected tides at different times of the day and the current water level. You can check the tides forecast throughout the week by scrolling the digital crown. If you want more data, you can hit the information panel to find the expected swell, wind, and weather at that date and time. The watch will automatically be set to the nearest beach via GPS—in my case, Pebble Beach on the north end of Brooklyn. You can hit the settings button on the top left corner to choose a different beach location in Apple Maps.

I’ve tried other popular tide-tracking apps but had far less success. They are either too filled up with data that would be helpful for a sailor but pointless for my needs, or they’re unusable on either phone or watch. Some of these apps use National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data from local stations, but they constantly fail to connect to that local information, instead showing me tide data for Santa Cruz in California, over 2,500 miles away from New York City.

Of all the relatively small improvements to Apple’s watch ecosystem alongside the slimmer Apple Watch Series 10, the Tides app is easily my favorite. A new Vitals app records your health data overnight and tells you if there’s anything amiss with your current health parameters. It’s only been a few days since Apple dropped the watch update, so it will take time to determine if these features are useful. The touted sleep apnea tracking is also now available now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the feature on Monday. It could prove useful, though the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra has a similar feature, and it already gave me the all the clear on any issues during my rest.

Among some other UI changes to Activity Rings and interactable widgets on the smart stack, Apple also snuck in an extra feature for the Watch Ultra. It’s now far easier to customize the programmable action button. You just need to hold it down to set if you want it to track workouts or open up some other functionality. It’s much faster than changing it on the app or in the watch settings. 

It’s hard for me to get excited about a smartwatch update like the Apple Watch Series 10, let alone a single, simplified smartwatch-specific app. But that’s the nature of these things. As somebody who is bombarded daily with new products and apps to check out, it’s often the ones that you don’t expect will hit you personally.

I’m a very specific kind of person. Few will care nearly as much as I do about the state of the tides, let alone for a non-professional purpose. I will likely never engage with the ocean as I wish I could, but I at least can remind myself of the people who put it best on a page. As is often said in O’Brian’s stories, time and tide truly wait for no man.