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> I’d be surprised if they aimed for their ship to arrive n days before the spring tide in case it got stuck.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that after the ship got stuck, they certainly incorporated the tides into their plan for how to unstick it. If the tides had been less amenable, they would have come up with a different plan.

So their plan didn't get "lucky", their plan was predicated on the tides being part of the solution.




Without the high tides the amount of material needed to be removed would have been dramatically higher.

That’s the point and the absolute bit of luck. Without the high tides they likely wouldn’t have been able to get it unstuck as quickly. Search for slope/fill volume calculation charts - the amount of fill required to be removed as you go deeper is logarithmic, NOT linear.

It was VERY lucky they had the highest tides possible.


Did the ship crash during high tide or low tide? The tide 6 days ago when it got stuck compared to today is more important.


What? Tide mattered more now because it had a significant impact on getting it out quickly.

Luckily it wasn’t nearly as high when it beached itself - but if it had beached itself on the downslope of the peak tide instead of the upslope it very likely would still be stuck!

Tide when it crashed was not nearly as significant as when it got free.


I disagree, i think you got that backwards - the tide level at the time of the beaching has surely had an effect on at what point it started plowing and was being decelerated and subsequently how far in absolute numbers evergreen went into the rim.

Imagine getting stuck during spring tide vs low tide hich is more than 2m lower and would have decelerated the ever given earlier


Sure but the luck here is the number of days until a sufficiently high tide. Imagine a simple model where every 28 days you get a sufficiently high tide and every other day is not sufficiently high, and the ship gets stuck (after high tide) on a uniformly random day. Then the expected time until the ship is unstuck is 14.5 days and the luck is how close you are to the time the ship can get free.


The "spring tide", the highest of the high tides, naturally occurs twice every 28 days. This is when the Sun, Earth and Moon are in a line. So the average wait would have been ~7 days.


It's even shorter timing than that. Spring tides occur at the full moon AND the new moon. So you get two chances every lunar cycle.




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