Rain? Not a drop…yet
Another glowing sunrise over the Sea of Cortes in Los Cabos, but still no rain. Photo by Ed Kociela
By Ed Kociela
When I grow up, I want to be a weatherman.
It’s not that I want to be on the TV and stand in front of a map of North America and point out where the isobars are going to wreak havoc with the jet stream and enable the monsoon to swoop through and dump heavily on the Southwest.
I just think it would be reassuring to know that even if you were wrong 80 percent of the time, your boss wouldn’t hold it against you.
Down here in Los Cabos, we have been keeping a fairly close eye on the weather for awhile now, and for awhile now, it has been wrong. We’ve had rain and thunderstorms in the forecast at least 10 times the last month and haven’t had a single drop yet. Some overcast, semi-cloudy—or is that partly cloudy—skies, but no rain.
We are into hurricane season and, so far, we’ve had six of them named, with the christening of Hurricane Fabio late last week, but we still haven’t had anything come remotely close to shore as most of them tighten up into fairly strong storms that turned due west, hundreds of miles south of us.
It may sound a little strange, but a lot of us are hoping that at least one of those storms breaks loose a little closer to the peninsula. It’s not that we’re thrill-seekers looking to test our mettle against Mother Nature, it’s just that we could really use the rain because La Baja is into its fifth year of drought. Our hurricane season will continue until Nov. 30, so there is still plenty of time for one of those storms to send a little precipitation our way. Our best bet is in September, I’m told, when the offshore waters warm.
I remember last summer when everybody got all excited because Hurricane Dora was heading our way. We were all sure that we would get a good bit of precipitation that would help recharge the aquifers and streams. All we got was some big waves at the beach. The hardest rainfall we’ve had in more than a year came on the Fourth of July last year when the heaven’s opened up for about a half an hour just as the fireworks were about to be launched.
Besides the fishing and tourism, Baja California Sur also has a lot of agribusiness, particularly on the western side of the peninsula where the temperatures are a little more moderate and there is a better water supply.
Now, however, the first growing season of the year is over and all we’re raising is dust, with a forecast for more of the same.
But, rain? There isn’t a sign of it anywhere, which creates a real tropical depression.
Ed Kociela is a writer for Los Cabos Magazine. You can reach him by email at
edkociela.mx@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/EdKociela.