There are generally faults dipping under the coastline of southern California. And, the maximum tide range in Santa Barbara is a little over 2 m. I think the reason Elizabeth and John did not find a correlation there, if they looked, is that there have been too few M5.5 quakes on these faults...they slip too slowly. There have been almost no quakes over 5.5 on these faults in the last few decades. In a couple of thousand years you may see a correlation when the sample size is large enough.
Chris