New link added--Hudson River Tidal Chart

I'll get some more photos up soon--just wanted to alert readers to a new feature--if you look over to the Dog Friendly Links on the right side of the page, you'll see a link to HudsonRiver.com--it's a tidal chart geared specifically towards the area around the George Washington Bridge.

When the tide is low, the beach area over near the rest rooms is fully exposed, and there's plenty of room--also there's usually little or no debris floating in the water.

When the tide is high, the beach is completely covered, and the dogs will have to climb back and forth over the rocks. Your dog can still swim--many do--but there'll usually be a fair bit of flotsam & jetsam--sometimes quite a lot. It can be a problem at times.

The very things that make the dog beach area so nice for swimming--the lack of a strong current, for one, and the circular eddy current that will eventually bring a flung toy back in to shore--mean that the aforementioned debris can hang around there for hours.

Also, the currents can be trickier. Usually a dog has to swim out quite a long way--further than you could ever throw a ball--to start running into problems. It's an unusually sheltered area of the river. But it's not for nothing the Mahican Indians used to call it "The River that runs both ways." When the tide is high, or in the process of shifting, a dog may not need to swim as far to reach areas with stronger currents.

So to sum up, high tide swimming is generally doable--but low tide is almost always preferable. A complicating factor is that low tide right after a heavy rain might be worse than high tide after a dry spell. There are a lot of factors to consider.

There's nothing to be done about the tide, but with the aid of this chart, you can learn in advance which mornings will be most suitable for canine aquatics. If you go to the bottom of the page, you'll see all sorts of options you can employ to look further ahead, or get the specific information you want.

If I can ever find any charts that will predict when the bathrooms will be open, or when the Park Enforcement Patrol will swing by in their Hondas, I'll be sure to put those up too.