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Every year, hundreds of lifeboat and lifeguard operations occur to rescue coastal users who have become cut off by tide. Tidal cut-off is a significant cause of lifeboat and lifeguard incidents with over 35,500 people aided and more than 200 lives saved in the last 5 years; however, despite the RNLI’s best efforts there are still multiple fatalities. To reduce the number of potentially life-threatening incidences a deeper understanding of the reasons why coastal users become exposed to this hazard is required. This project addressed this by looking at people’s concepts and understanding of the tide. Our goal was to help the RNLI develop precautionary interventions in a more targeted way, responding directly to coastal users’ conceptual needs. 

Our starting point was the intuition that people will naturally generalise from previous experiences with the tide, not realising that tidal movements can differ radically between places and at different times. In this work we explored what the common misconceptions are that lead to millions of children, adults, residents and tourists accidentally putting themselves in danger.

• Extensive communications between RNLI and academics
• Review of relevant literature
• Interviews with individuals who had been cut off by tide and rescued by the RNLI.
• Nationally representative online survey that assessed the public understanding of the tide, and ability to interpret a tide table when visiting a beach

• Our survey revealed that over 15% of the public report having been cut off by tide, or nearly so.
• Four in ten people lack basic knowledge about the tides: that it comes in twice a day, that in the same location tides rise and fall at different times each day, and that the size of rise and fall of tides varies across different parts of the country.
• Over a quarter of the British and Irish public struggled to read a basic tide table, and only a quarter of participants demonstrated ability to derive more complex information from it. People frequently misjudge their own ability to read a tide table.
• Common misconceptions leading to cut off included the tide coming in much faster and stronger than expected, and often from a different direction. People often expect that the water will come straight in to the shore, quite slowly, enabling them to simply walk back on the sandbanks when needed. However, the tide rarely just uniformly advances and retreats across a beach. Instead, it will initially flow laterally along channels and around sandbanks, cutting them off from the mainland and removing any safe route back to land – and this can happen much faster than expected.
• This demonstrates a national failure to understand the variability in tidal movement—one of the most fundamental aspects of the ocean.
• We suggest considering the addition of a new essential principle to the agenda, aiming to improve societal tidal literacy and risk recognition on the coast.