Where the tide empties the harbour, from Wells to the Bay of Fundy
When I pulled a frame from the Port of Wells camera at 13:20 UTC on 2026-10-13, the harbour had no water in it. Yachts upright on wet sand, a green channel buoy lying over, the Run narrowed to a blue thread you could throw a rope across, and a row of dinghies on the mud at the quay. Seven hours earlier the same frame is a lake. The Environment Agency's tide gauge sits 80 m from that camera, and its readings show the water at 2.674 m at 19:30 on 2026-10-12 and -0.094 m at 04:15 the next morning: 2.77 m of swing, twice a day, every day.
That is what makes a tidal camera worth keeping a tab open on. Most cameras show you weather, which is interesting for about four seconds. These ones show you the same place as two entirely different places, on a timetable published weeks in advance, which means you can decide to be watching when it happens.
Six are worth the tab. All of them were live when I checked them this morning.
Wells, where the water goes away for five hours
The Port of Wells camera is live video rather than a still that refreshes, served in segments of about 1.3 seconds when I read the playlist on 2026-10-13, so you watch it rather than reload it. It looks north down the channel towards the sand bar and the wind farm on the horizon. The camera burns its own clock into the top left corner and that clock was running about 15 minutes fast against UTC when I checked, which is worth knowing before you use it to time anything.
The flat part is the surprise. On 2026-10-13 the gauge read between -0.094 and -0.027 m from 00:00 to 05:00 UTC, five hours within 7 cm of its floor, because once the harbour has drained there is nothing left to fall. Then it came back: -0.027 m at 05:00 and 1.701 m at 06:00, a metre and three quarters in an hour. If you want the fast part at Wells, that is the hour to be looking.
Morecambe Bay fills quicker than you would walk it
Arnside Pier points across the Kent estuary from the promenade. At 14:17 local time today the water was brown and right up under the sea wall, the road was wet from the morning's rain, and two people were standing by a parked car looking at it, which is roughly what the camera is for. At low water that whole frame is sand.
The numbers come from the Environment Agency gauge at Heysham, 19.7 km down the bay, which recorded 2.102 m at 07:00 UTC and 9.750 m at 12:30 UTC on 2026-10-13. That is 7.6 m in five and a half hours, in a bay whose sands are flat enough that the edge of the water moves faster than a person walks. The Morecambe Bay Partnership's page on the Arnside bore says the warning siren sounds twice before a daylight high tide, first about 30 minutes before the tide is due and again as it arrives, and that it runs from Easter through October, so it is still sounding this week. Be on the promenade an hour and a half to two hours before high water if you want the bore, and accept that it may not amount to much: the same page says it is impossible to predict when it will be at its most spectacular.
Six kilometres south, the Morecambe promenade camera covers the beach, the stone jetty and the clock tower, and at 14:19 today it had surf breaking against the sea wall and a digger working on the sand at the far end.
The bay at Mont-Saint-Michel, with people walking on it
The best camera here is not the one at the abbey. It is the Écomusée camera at Vains, 5.7 km northeast across the water, which looks southwest over the salt marsh with the Mont on the left of the frame and the rock of Tombelaine on the right. Its frame was written at 13:18 GMT today and it updates about every two and a half minutes. In that frame a line of a dozen or so walkers in coloured jackets was strung out across the sand in single file, a guided bay crossing heading out at low water, and they are the thing that gives the picture its scale: at that distance the Mont is a thumbnail and the people are dots, which tells you how much ground the sea covers when it comes back.
The other camera at the Mont, the abbey view, is a YouTube embed, and our nightly check found it live at 12:25 UTC today.
Six metres of Fundy at Saint John
The Canadian Coast Guard runs two cameras on Saint John harbour, and they are half-hourly stills rather than video: Saint John Range and Partridge Island. Both frames were written at 13:03 GMT and had not changed when I re-fetched them at 13:21, which fits the half hour. The Range camera this morning had a cruise ship alongside the terminal, container cranes on the far shore and a red hull working at the dock. Partridge Island looks the other way, north up the harbour at the city and the mill.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada predicted 7.588 m at 04:59 UTC and 1.322 m at 11:07 UTC for Saint John today, a range of 6.27 m under those two cameras. Up at the head of the bay it gets absurd: the same service has Burntcoat Head going from 1.150 m at 12:26 UTC to 14.173 m at 18:26 UTC, 13 m in six hours, the largest tides measured anywhere. Nobody has a camera on any of that: not at Burntcoat Head, not at Hopewell Rocks, and not on the Petitcodiac bore at Moncton, which DFO times at 15:11 UTC today. Saint John is as close as a public camera gets, at less than half the range.
Holy Island, cut off this afternoon
Lindisfarne Castle has the castle on its crag, sheep on the slope below it and the North Sea off to the right, live video, and the playlist I read on 2026-10-13 was cutting it into two-second segments. It does not show the causeway, which is the one thing I wanted it to show. What it does give you is the island while the island is an island: Northumberland County Council's crossing times put the causeway unsafe from 14:55 to 20:35 today, safe again from 20:35 until 03:20 on Wednesday, and the council asks for 30 minutes of margin on top because wind moves the numbers.
What we do with this
Every camera on the site gets re-fetched and re-checked about once a day, and the positions are indexed so that near=<lat>,<lng>&radius_km=<n> returns what is actually around a place rather than what happens to be named after it. That is how this list got made: Arnside does not have Morecambe in its name and Vains does not have Mont-Saint-Michel in its, and both are the better camera.
What none of these pages tell you is where the tide is right now. The state is knowable for every one of them, from a gauge or a prediction service, and it would turn a camera page into something you could act on: open it at the right hour rather than the wrong one. I would like the tide state on the page next to the frame, and I do not yet know whether the gauge coverage is good enough outside the UK and Canada to do it without the page lying in places like the Mediterranean, where the range is centimetres and a prediction service may not bother. If you know a tide API with honest global coverage and a licence that allows this, tell me, because that is the part I am stuck on.