Let's assume you will travel from the Solent or Poole, though this process works well from Weymouth and even Brixham and Dartmouth if you can make 6 knots.

Conveniently, it is 60 miles from the Needles Fairway buoy to Cherbourg, so at 5 knots it will take 12 hours.  It is not hard to use other speeds and times

Do not work out a course to steer for every hour.  The easy way is to use Reeve-Fowkes Manual of Tides for the Central or Western Channel:

See here for more detail on a course to steer for several hours of tide:   Tide Planning

The Reeve Fowkes atlas gives you the average tide for each hour before/after High Water, and you find the actual speed by applying the height of HW at Cherbourg to a look up table, so there is no need for Computation of Rates.

Find the tide (east or west going) for each hour of the passage, using HW Cherbourg as the reference port:

  www.acblack.com/images/nautical/reeds/ Cherbourg tide card 2011.pdf   

Assume the tide is at right angles to your Course over the Ground.  Add up the west and east going columns, and subtract one from the other.  This gives the net tide for your Course to Steer for a 5 knot boat speed.