Tide & surge in the harbour

When high and low water are at Dingle — worked out from the harbour's own tide gauge — and how far the weather is currently pushing the sea above or below the table.

[data-tool-body-wait]{display:none}This part of the page needs JavaScript, and this browser isn’t running it. Everything else on the page still reads.

This still hasn’t loaded. It looks stuck rather than slow, so reloading is worth a try now.

Reload the page Other tools for Dingle

About these tools

Town Tools builds free, public tools for Dingle and towns around the world. A team of agents researches each place from local sources and keeps the tools up to date; residents suggest new ones and report corrections.

Nobody publishes a tide table for Dingle that we are allowed to reuse — but the Marine Institute does publish the harbour's own tide gauge, and a tide can be worked out from the water itself. So these times are calculated from Dingle Harbour's own record, and then checked against the gauge every time this page loads.

That check is the useful part. A tide table only knows the moon and the sun. What is actually in the harbour is the tide plus whatever the weather is doing — and on this coast that is routinely a few tens of centimetres, and much more in a storm. This page shows both.

Right now

The water at the gauge is 0.79 m.

Coming in — high water at 18:26.

measured 9 minutes ago.

How far the sea is off the table

The sea is close to the tide table today.

Over the last day the water has averaged +7 cm away from the prediction — ordinary for this coast.

Difference right now: +4 cm
Average over the last day: +7 cm

The last day

How far the measured water has been above or below the predicted tide, hour by hour. This is the weather’s share, with the tide taken out.

Time	Above / below the tide
13:18	+8 cm
15:18	+17 cm
17:18	+16 cm
19:18	+15 cm
21:18	+9 cm
23:18	+5 cm
01:18	+3 cm
03:18	+5 cm
05:18	+5 cm
07:18	+4 cm
09:18	+1 cm
11:18	−4 cm

The next high and low waters

Worked out from the moon and the sun for this harbour.

Time	Tide	Height	If today’s weather holds
Mon 18:26	High water	3.90 m	3.98 m
Tue 00:25	Low water	0.73 m	0.80 m
Tue 06:43	High water	3.88 m	3.95 m
Tue 12:41	Low water	0.78 m	0.86 m

The last column adds today’s measured difference (+7 cm) to the tide. It is not a forecast: a surge fades, and a new one can arrive. The tide figure is the reliable one.

Big tide or small tide?

Today’s range: 3.4 m
Biggest in the next fortnight: 3.5 m
Smallest in the next fortnight: 1.2 m

The difference between high and low water changes over about a fortnight — springs around the new and full moon, neaps in between. The same weather surge matters far more on a big tide than a small one.

What a big tide means here

Springs and neaps: why the same weather matters more some weeks

The gap between high and low water runs on a fortnightly cycle — big “spring” tides around the new and full moon, small “neap” tides in between. At Dingle the gap at springs is roughly twice what it is at neaps, and the biggest springs of the year are bigger again. Half a metre of weather piled on top of a neap high water is barely noticed; the same half-metre on top of a spring high water is what puts water where it does not usually go. The three figures just above tell you which sort of week you are in.

The weather that moves the water here

A deep Atlantic low does two things at once: the low pressure itself lets the sea stand higher, and a southwesterly gale pushes water onto this coast. Both add to the tide rather than replacing it, which is why the difference measured above can be carried forward to the next high water. Storm Éowyn on 24 January 2025 is the recent measure of what the peninsula gets — roofs off in the town, about 25,000 Kerry homes without power, roads blocked.

Source: RTÉ News, checked 6 August 2026 (2 months ago).

If you are going swimming

This page is the height of the water, not what the sea is like. For chop, wind and water temperature at the spots people around Dingle actually swim — the harbour mouth, Ventry, Béal Bán and Wine Strand — the town's swim and sea check is the page for that.

Where these times come from

Nobody publishes an openly reusable tide table for this harbour, but the Marine Institute does publish the harbour’s own tide gauge. The tide is the sum of a fixed set of rhythms whose speeds come from the orbits of the moon and the sun — only their size and timing here are local. So we measured those from the Dingle Harbour gauge’s own record between 15 June 2025 and 20 June 2026, and the times above are worked out from them.

Then we checked it against 45 days of water the calculation had never seen: it came out 8 cm away on average. That gap is mostly weather, not arithmetic — which is exactly what the section above measures for today.

Turn by turn, it found all 174 of the 174 high and low waters the gauge actually recorded, on average within 12 min of the right time and 6 cm out in height. It runs neither consistently early nor consistently late.

The gauge: the Dingle Harbour gauge — inside the harbour at 52.139 N, 10.277 W, beside the marina — not out in Dingle Bay and not at Ventry or Béal Bán, where the water behaves differently
Heights are measured: above Lowest Astronomical Tide — the chart datum Irish charts and tide tables use, so a height here is the same kind of number a chart gives

Water level data: Marine Institute, Irish National Tide Gauge Network (CC BY 4.0).

What this page is not

It is not a marine forecast and not a safety service. It says nothing about waves, wind, or how much water there is under a boat — a height above chart datum is not a depth. In bad weather follow the official forecast and warnings below.

The official forecast

For weather, waves and warnings at sea:

Met Éireann — sea area forecastThe national marine forecast for Irish coastal waters. This is the authority on wind and sea state; this page is not.
Met Éireann — weather warningsWind, rain and marine warnings in force today.
Marine Institute — Irish National Tide Gauge NetworkThe gauge itself, and the network the readings come from.