Title text:
They're up there with coral islands, lightning, and caterpillars turning into butterflies.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3135/
Tidal prediction requires a harmonic analysis of observed tides, and its location specific. Not sure how a watch is supposed to do that other than holding a database of tidal coefficients.
This video contains a lot of interesting history of tidal analysis and prediction: