Hurricane Season

April 17, 2017

These days, our lives revolve around weather. As you can probably guess, the ocean can be a nasty beast if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. And since our little floating home lives on the ocean, you can also probably guess that we do our best to avoid anything that resembles nasty on the high seas. Which brings me to what is coming our way pretty quickly – hurricane season.

Hurricane season in Mexico starts, depending on which source you read, somewhere between May 15^th and June 1^st and continues to approximately November 31^st. If you are doing the math, that equals roughly 6 months. For half of the year, there is a pretty good chance that somewhere in Mexico, a hurricane may be forming and knocking at our door, and I can't stress this enough, that's a knock that we don't want to answer.

So the big question is what are we going to do about it? Well, there are a number of options and they all basically mean the same thing – we need to get out of the hurricane zone. The typical hurricane zone runs from about 5 degrees north of the equator to roughly 23.5 degrees north, the Tropic of Cancer, although hurricanes have been known to travel farther north into the Sea of Cortez on occasion. In the interest of not getting too technical and also in the interest in keep this post somewhat short, here are the options we've come up with to help us avoid a hurricane. And yes, all of them except number 4 are intriguing to us.

Option 1: set sail for the South Pacific

Option 2: go south to Central America

Option 3: go north into the Sea of Cortez

Option 4: store the boat and fly back to the States for 6 months

Again, in the interest of keeping this somewhat short, I'll just tell you that option #3 is what we are going for and it's for 2 reasons. The first and most important, is that we are enjoying Mexico too much to leave so soon. And second, there is still a bunch more of the country we want to see.

What this means is that we need to start working our way north to be out of the “zone” before hurricane season starts. We've got one month to cover the handful of hundreds of miles north to accomplish this task. This morning, that journey started. We took advantage of a little weather window, left Barra de Navidad, and made a short hop north to Tenacatita where we'll spend some time with some good friends who have chosen Option #2 and are headed south to Central America. From here, we'll wait for another weather window before we make another hop north. And on and on we'll go until we are out of the zone.

If you take a quick minute and look at the map I've included down below, you will notice that the Sea of Cortez is actually Mexico's armpit. It's incredibly beautiful in Mexico's armpit, but everyone knows an armpit is hot. Really hot. So yeah, we'll be living in an armpit for the summer and my brain will likely melt and kill any smarts I had left before we make it out of the Sea of Cortez next fall. As a boy from Seattle, whose summertime high temperatures are hovering around the blistering 75 degrees (24* C), I'm not sure how I'll do with temps in the 100's (38* C). And yes, I can here you murmuring that it won't be too bad because it's a dry heat. Dry heat or not, 100+ degrees in an armpit is just plain hot. But the good news is that the refreshing ocean is just a jump off of the side of the boat away to cool off. I have a feeling that we'll be spending a lot of time in the water this summer.

If the armpit is just too hot and we can't bear it, we've got some other ideas and options that we are kicking around as well. Mostly, those ideas and options involve storing the boat and doing some inland travel in Mexico as well as maybe some side trips to Central and South America. As always, we'll keep you posted on what we are up to as things change.

From where we are now, we've got about 900 miles of northbound coast to explore, countless islands and bays to see, and an ungodly amount of tacos to eat before this upcoming hurricane season ends. It's going to be great.

But for the next couple of days, we are going to be spending time with our good friends before we part ways. And after that, north we go.