Word: tiding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...opposite end of Chappaquiddick, where, Kennedy said, he jumped into the water and battled a ferocious northward-flowing current to reach Edgartown, on the other side of a 500-ft. channel from Chappaquiddick (see map). For different reasons, the Star and Reader's Digest concluded that the tide had actually been flowing in the opposite direction and would have helped rather than endangered the Senator during his swim. The Digest flatly said that Kennedy's story "is false...
...direction and strength of the tide during the swim are central to one of the most important questions about Chappaquiddick: Why did Kennedy wait until almost ten hours after the accident before reporting it to the police? At a January 1970 inquest, he gave a vivid account of how he had plunged into the water and then "felt an extraordinary shove ... the tide began to draw me out, and for the second time that evening I knew I was going to drown ... I remembered being swept down toward the direction of the Edgartown Light and well out into the darkness...
Government tide tables for the area seemed to back up the Senator's story, but both the Digest and Star raised serious questions. Bernard Le Mehaute, an oceanographic engineer commissioned by the Digest, studied the tides on Nov. 9-10,1979, which he determined were nearly identical, after some minor adjustments, to those on the night of the accident. He concluded that a northward current could have been flowing that night, just as Kennedy said. But Mehaute found that by 1:30 a.m., when the Senator said he had jumped into the channel, the tide would have been "weak...
...Washington Star relied on entirely different evidence. It produced aerial photos, dated May and November 1969, of the sandbar opening through which ocean tides swept northward into Katama Bay, through the channel between Edgartown and Chappaquiddick and out into the sound. According to the pictures, the opening into Katama Bay was still clear in May but had been blocked by sand by November. The Star indicated that the opening had gradually silted up during the intervening months. The newspaper concluded that by July 18 the gap would have been too narrow and shallow to let in a northward current...
...swim, observed no struggle, concluded that he could reach Edgartown with no trouble and returned to the cottage. Kennedy told reporters last week that he might not have shown any signs of difficulty that were visible to Gargan and Markham, but that he nonetheless had battled against a fierce tide...