Hello Wilco, thank you very much for taking an interest in my manuscript and for submitting comments which have improved those aspects of the paper.  I have added my responses to your feedback within the attached pdf. 

Hi Chris, thanks for taking the time to review my manuscript and for your comments which I appreciate very much.  Thank you, too, for your kind comments and I am pleased that you found the topic of some interest.  Here are my responses to your comments:

 Line 7: Would a brief explanantion of the Board of Longitude, its importance at the time etc., be of use to the reader?

Response: I have added a footnote when the Board is first mentioned in the main text instead of the abstract.

Line 35: I think a brief explanantion of the phenomena "full & change of the Moon" would be beneficial.

Response: I have added a footnote to explain this archaic term.

Is it "Queen Charlotte Sound" (Line 10) or "Queen Charlotte’s Sound" (Line 40) [I think it is the former]?- this difference appears throughout the text.

I use the latter when referring to Cook's time and the present name when referring to modern observations.  Some inconsistencies had crept in which I've corrected.  I have also improved the footnote explaining my nomenclature so it reads: Cook visited this sound during his first voyage and named it after the wife of King George III; it is now known as Queen Charlotte Sound / Tōtaranui.  Cook’s nomenclature is used when referring to the work carried out by Bayly and Wales, and the current name when using modern sources

Line 47: Should the latin term "prima facie" be in italics?  

Response: The house standard accepts common latin phrases in standard text, less common ones are italicised.  I consider prima facie to be well known, but in any event the publishing process will pick up on this if required.

Line 188 "The predicted tide curve, based on modern data, is shown in blue". Would a little more detail on this modern-day analysis (timeseries analysies, no of harmnonic constituents, residual statistics etc), be of benefit to the reader?

Response: I have included the lengths of the time series that were analysed, I think this is sufficient for the reader to appreciate about the analysis. 

General comment: Wales's "Tube" is essentially a 'stilling-well'. It could be worth making this comment somewhere in the text.

Response: Agreed, I have inserted that descriptor for Wales's wooden tube and Bayly's glass tube.

In the conclusions:

"These comparisons assume, firstly, that the tides have not changed materially during the intervening period..."...Might it be worth considering some sort of simple assessment of the bathymetry / geomorphology of the two locations over the years (i.e. between the dates of these historic observations to the dates of the modern-day records). This would then confirm that no significant 'natural' change has occurred adding to the validity of this statement. 

Response: he following senetnce has been added at line 405: Whilst the former assumption is considered reasonable, Cook’s bathymetric data is either too sparse (only 12 soundings in Dusky Bay), or non-existent in Queen Charlotte’s Sound, to test this hypothesis.

Line 424 "nonastronomical"? Would "non-astronomical" read better?

Response: Hyphen inserted.

Line 431 "Whilst the sea level observations made by Bayly and Wales are of little scientific value today (but would have provided valuable information for mariners, in the absence of further observations meanwhile, until the mid-20th century), now they are historically significant as the first measurements by tide gauge in New Zealand." Suggest rewording the last sentence to ".....their historical significance as the first measurements by tide gauge in new Zealand is undisputable."

Response: Agreed, suggested wording adopted.

Hi Phil, I can't begin to thank you enough for taking the trouble to review my manuscript a second time after it reached the pre-print stage of the publication process.  As before, your comments have ensured that the quality of the final version is much higher than it would have been without your input.

My responses to your comments follow.  Note that I have limited the following to those points that warrant a response comment - all your other comments (e.g. grammar or the insertion of words) have been implemented verbatim as you have suggested.

8 - I would reverse the names of Wales and Bayly so as to have 'respectively' before ', one to each vessel'. Unless there is some reason to have Bayly first. That would then be consistent with the order of the ship names on line 6 and the location names on line 10. (I do understand though that the pair are usually referred to as Bayly first.)

Response: Names reversed as suggested; and you are correct that when referring to both subsequently I have put them in alphabetical order. 

58 - I would call him Nevil Maskelyne rather than Dr. I am not sure he was formally a Dr. anyway, usually he is referred to as Rev.

Response: Dr replaced with Nevil.

69 - give Mary's surname

Response: the sentence now begins: "Wales married Mary, the sister of Charles Green, the astronomer on Cook’s first voyage ..."

74 - it is amazing this was painted a century later

Response: It would have indeed been amazing, but I made a typo and the caption now has the correct year (1794).

97 - some readers are going to struggle with mean and apparent times so I would add here something like:

(Apparent or 'sun-dial' time can differ from local mean time by aproximately a quarter of an hour due to the 'equation of time', Hughes et al. 1989).

Hughes, D. W., Yallop, B. D., and Hohenkerk, C. Y.: The equation of time, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc., 238, 1529–1535,

https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/238.4.1529, 1989.

Response: your description added as a footnote and the publication added to the reference listing.

130 - comma before 'was used'

Response: comma added.  This sentence now a new Sect. 4.2 (Analysis of modern sea level data) and reworded to read: "Harmonic analysis, using software based on that of Foreman (1977, updated 2004), of hourly sea level data recorded at Motuara Island (over 8 months during 2022) and Many Islands (44 days during 2017) produced a set of tidal constituents (harmonic constants) for each island."

The section headed Tide predictions becomes 4.3 and commences with this sentence: "Foreman’s software can also be used to combine the amplitudes and phase lags of the location’s tidal constituents to create tide predictions for a specified period of time for that place."

139 - 'which begins at noon on the civil day'. I think you should mention here therefore that in the astronomical day (and the naval day) PM comes before AM. Also you should give a reference to where it is said that Bayly and Wales used the astronomical day in their records.

Response: Bayly and Wales use the 24hr clock for their times, they do not refer to AM or PM.  I have not seen them state that they use the astronomical day, but I confirmed this by checking their timing of Jovian sattelite events with times computed by Gray (2020).  The sentence now reads: "The predicted times then had 12 hr deducted to align with the astronomical day (which begins at noon, 12 hours after the beginning of the civil day), to conform to the time system used by Bayly and Wales." 

148-152 - this little section looks superficial. Could you not merge the two sentences into the following sections?

Response: Agreed.  The first sentence (lines 148-149) moved to the beginning of Sect. 5.1.  Lines 15-152 deleted, rewitten and inserted at the beginning of Sect. 5.2 and reads: "As the historic and predicted sea level heights do not share a common vertical reference, it is not possible to relate the heights of the observed and predicted heights in an absolute way.  Therefore, in order to investigate sea level heights, we must turn to comparing tidal ranges as calculated by differencing the heights of sequential high and low waters."

151 - .. predicted tides in an absolute way. Therefore, water ... limited to comparisons of sets of heights with offsets between them.

Or something like that, I have a problem with the way figures 5 etc. are plotted. You must have aligned the measurements and the predictions so they have the same average value? Otherwise I can't see how you can plot them both together. Then, what is the datum of the y-axis? I suspect it is the chart datum of the predictions. This needs a slightly fuller explanation.

Response: see response to previous comment, also, the sentence starting at line 177 now reads: "After the historic measurements had been converted to ‘upward’ values, an arbitrary offset was applied to each series of observations to enable the observed and predicted datasets to be plotted together in Fig. 5, 7, 8, 11 and 12."

190 - Gray (2020) is not in the references

Response: it was there, but now I have put it in alphabetical order.

192 - Again, this needs a fuller explanation of what the heights are. Whether as shown in the original records or adjusted.

Response: now reads: "Tables A1 – A4 in Appendix A list the times, and heights (processed as described in Sect. 5.2), of the high and low waters observed by Bayly and Wales, the predicted values, and the differences between them."

221 -  and also a few in between

Response: the 'few in between' is already covered by the words 'before, at and after'

256 - this section is a quotation and should be indented

Response: agreed, it was a quote and indenting was accidentally omitted.  Another reviewer suggested that this be paraphrased to clarify the important aspects in the quote as there is a lot of detail that could be difficult for a non-native english speaker to grasp.  I accepted this suggestion and the text (non-quote) now reads: "A glass tube, four feet long and 0.7 inches in diameter, was attached to a long wood rod which was divided into feet, inches and quarters of inch to serve as a scale.  The rod was, in turn, attached to a post set firmly in the water.  A bamboo cane, with a very small hole, fitted to the tube provided a narrow aperture for admitting the water into the glass tube.  The tube performed admirably as a stilling well as Bayly found that he could read the height of the water in the tube to a quarter of an inch or better, and that the level fluctuated no more than one-tenth of an inch even as the sea rose and fell by a foot due to wave action (Bayly, 1774b, p. 36)."

315 - maybe the 3 hours was just a throw-away remark. They were professional astronomers and their lunar transit times would have been reliable.

Response: agreed that their transit times would have been reliable.  I have accepted the 3 hour value at face value - my finding that the average was  an hour longer (line 324) is a statement, not a judgement.  No change. 

343, 349 - this is not the equilibrium tide involved here as such, it is just because of the length of the lunar day

Response: thanks for picking up on this.  

Lines 343-344 now read: "... amounted to 6 hr 40 min was based on the length of a lunar day being 50 min longer than a solar day."

Lines 348-349 now read: "... with the average over those days being less than that expected, hence his concern about the accuracy of his observations."

367 - offset. They ..

Response: this sentence rewritten upon the suggestions of other reviewers.  Now reads: "Bayly set up two posts at different heights and measured the vertical offset of their zero marks to be 4 ft ¾ inch.  The posts were, in effect, one gauge in two parts – one for high water, the other low water.  The offset distance had to be added to the high water readings to obtain values consistent with the low water observations."

429 - of tide heights presented

Response: my comparative analysis was of tidal ranges (which had been calculated from heights).  No change.

445 - heights and for the adjusted measured ones (presumably?)

Response: sentence now reads: "Tidal ranges have been calculated where a high and its immediately following low water, or a low water and its following high water, were observed."

Table A1, line 1 - 22:17 minus 22:21 should be -00:04 and not -00:17? I just spotted this by chance and I haven't looked at others

Response: thanks for 'accidentally' spotting this error.  I have double-checked all difference values in the tables in Appendix A.

Table B1 - are these constants in timezonee 1200 or adjusted ones? Please make it clear. Give the timezone. Phase should be phase lag.

Response: The intro to Appendix B now reads: "As described in Sect. 4.3, the original phase lags for the modern locations have been adjusted to the longitude of the historic tide gauge sites to enable valid time comparisons." [Note that a new subsection has been added, so the section reference has been updated}

The caption for Table B1 now reads: "Harmonic constituents used to generate tide predictions for comparison with Wales’s observations at Pickersgill Harbour."

The caption for Table B2 now reads: "Harmonic constituents used to generate tide predictions for comparison with Bayly’s and Wales’s observations at Ship Cove."