We had a lovely walk in the sun today on my favorite high-mileage, low-profile winter hike.
I mainly wanted to add a note about the tide and some specific, actionable recommendations based on our experience.
The lower the tide, the firmer the walking surface; the higher the tide, the more you are pushed into soft sand, rocks, and driftwood. If you want to have a nice time on this hike, just looking at the times for high and low tide is not sufficient, you also need to pay attention to how low and how high they are. I think this hike is best done when the tide is below 5', and I would not personally choose to do it if the tide is above 6.5'. Depending on the chart for a given day, there might be a "low" tide that stays above 5', so just looking at the time of low tide -- or copying when others hiked this in relation to the time of low tide that day -- does not guarantee a comfy walk.
The chart I included uses this weekend's tides as an example, with my personal recommendation of when it is ideal. You can look up tide charts for yourself on the NOAA website, by selecting Port Angeles and the date of your visit to determine the best time of day to go all 11 miles.
Fortunately for us, today's "high low tide" was at 6am, and the "low low tide" of -1' was going to be at ~7pm, making this a great day to sleep in and hike in the afternoon. We started at about 11:30 just after the high water mark. Our first mile or so on the beach we were sliding around on rocks and loose sand closer to the driftwood, but the tide went out as we hiked and by the time it hit the 5' mark, it became noticeably easier for the duration of our hike.
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