About Tidewake
Tidewake is a working pilot for coastal paddling: one page per segment of water, each written around the tide and the wind rather than around the view.
What this is
Each guide in the paddle atlas covers one segment of coast — a distance you could reasonably paddle in a day, between two points you can actually launch and land at. Every entry carries the same pilotage fields: distance, tide window, wind limit, launch access, hazards, wildlife, bail-outs and the return leg. The numbers come first and the description follows, because that is the order in which the decisions get made.
The site is bilingual. The English page is the canonical location for each segment and the Chinese page hangs off it at /zh/, so the two versions of one segment are always next to each other. Prose is written once per language rather than translated line by line, because a literal translation of tidal terminology is worse than useless.
How the routes are chosen
Every segment has to be a real day out: a genuine launch, a genuine landing, and at least two places you could get off the water early if you had to. Segments are grouped on two axes — the coast they sit on, and whether they are best paddled on the flood, the ebb or the slack. Both axes matter, and the atlas lets you browse either way.
Guides are published on a drip. Roughly a third of the atlas is live and the rest is dated into the future, so what you see today is a complete, self-consistent set of routes rather than an empty site waiting for content. A segment that is not yet published is not linked from anywhere.
What this is not
This is not a substitute for a chart, a tide table, a forecast or training. The numbers here are planning inputs, not predictions: the actual stream on the day depends on the range, the wind, the barometric pressure and the recent rainfall, and a passage that is straightforward on a neap can be serious on a big spring.
It is also not a guide to conditions on the day. Nobody can tell you from a written page whether the water at the entrance to a harbour is workable this afternoon. That judgement is yours, made on the shore, looking at it.