High Tide at the Spanish Arch

Galway resident Michael D Higgins probably feels like he could walk on water right now, as he is poised to become the ninth President of Ireland. He’d have plenty of opportunity tonight in the city as a combination of a high tide, a large outflow from the river Corrib and a strong onshore wind meant that the sea flooded onto the pier along by the Spanish Arch (as well as the promenade in Salthill). This type of flooding happens every time there is a seasonally high tide – here is a picture from September 2009 and here is a picture from March this year. This picture is what the scene looks like when the tide is out. It will probably be worse tomorrow morning (as the tide will be a bit higher, and the winds are meant to be stronger).

Here is a timelapse video taken of the tide rising onto the pier for the last hour leading up to high tide this evening (high tide was 18:48 this evening). It was created by taking a picture every 5 seconds and then creating a movie from the images using Quicktime 7 (using over 700 images in total) – the ‘frame rate’ was 24 images per second of video.