Hurricane season in Mexico stretches from early June until the beginning of November, and storm activity this year has so far been fairly close to the historical average. Until this week, there have been 11 named storms (tropical storms or hurricanes), including three major hurricanes. Luckily for us and for the people of coastal Mexico, all of these storms have just paralleled the coast before making a left and heading towards Hawaii.
This shows the tracks of the first 10 named storms this summer in the Eastern North Pacific
Hurricane Lorena is the twelfth storm of the season, and this one is different than the previous disturbances. Instead of spinning up several hundred miles off of the coast, Lorena formed just offshore. Since hurricanes in the Eastern North Pacific generally move northwestward, Lorena caused a hurricane watch for the entire central coast of Mexico from Manzanillo to Puerto Vallarta.
Time to take down the sun shade in preparation for Lorena and the wind she is forecast to bring
We take the risk of a tropical storm seriously, and we prepared the boat as well as we could. We installed double docklines on each side of the boat, added chafe guards to any lines that could rub in the potential storm surge, and pulled down our sunshades to reduce windage on the boat.
Angie sewed some new chafe guards to add to Madrone’s dock lines
As Lorena churned her way up the coast, her eye ran into Cabo Corrientes, the headland that forms the southern tip of Puerto Vallarta’s Banderas Bay. This interaction with land sucked most of the punch out of the storm, and we only saw 24 hours or so of fairly heavy rain at our marina 40 or so miles from the eye.
The predicted path of Lorena, as well as hurricane and storm warnings, as she is coming up the coast of SW Mexico
Lorena is forecast to restrengthen as she heads away from land and towards Baja California, and our thoughts are with folks who live there. But we’re happy that our closest brush with a hurricane so far turned out to be anticlimactic.
