Baja Ha-Ha Founder Richard Spindler Comments on the Hurricane Season

With the approaching start of the Baja Ha-Ha, Ha-Ha founder Richard Spindler wrote some comments on his Facebook page to give some perspective on the 2026 hurricane season.

As the architect of the Baja Ha-Ha and the individual who ran it for 31 years, even though I’m retired, I’d like to address some of the concerns that this year’s Ha-Ha entries may be having about the late-season hurricanes in Mexico.

First of all, there is nothing uncommon about this hurricane season. There have been 22 named storms this year, including 12 hurricanes.

The record was 27 named storms in the El Niño year of 1997. Sixteen of those were hurricanes, a number matched in 1990, 1992, 2015 and 2024.

The average over a long period of time has been 15 named storms, with eight of them being hurricanes.

When I created the Ha-Ha I built in what I believed was a good buffer to protect the fleet against tropical storms and hurricanes. As the publisher of Latitude 38, I’d been to dozens of post-hurricane sites and had seen the terrible destruction the storms can cause.

Years ago, for example, I’d been keeping my Ocean 71 Big O in Culebra, which was considered an ultimate Caribbean hurricane hole. I’d had my captain run the boat up to Virgin Gorda for a bottom job when a massive hurricane hit Culebra. So I wasn’t there when something like 315 of the 320 boats were obliterated by a hurricane. But I saw the damage later. Yikes!

I’d also seen the remnants of the 700-boat fleet in St. Martin’s Simpson Bay after Luis came through. Only a couple of boats survived in that totally enclosed bay.

As hurricanes terrify me, I never wanted to subject myself to one, and that goes many times over for members of any fleet I was leading.

The thing to know is that starting in mid-October, environmental conditions begin to change significantly along the Ha-Ha route. The air temperatures begin to cool, particularly at night, the ocean temperature starts to cool, the days get shorter, and the amount of hurricane-killing wind shear increases.

That’s why in the 31 years of the Ha-Ha there has never been a tropical storm, let alone a hurricane, that has passed through the Ha-Ha route during the Ha-Ha dates.

That said, there are three times when I, as Grand Poobah, made the decision to partly or totally modify the Ha-Ha because of weather.

In 2009, upper Baja was subjected to moderately strong northwesterly winds, not hurricane in nature. As the Poobah, I suggested that some less experienced crews and/or those with smaller boats might want to take shelter in one of the several great anchorages between Ensenada and Turtle Bay. To give support, we joined a group of them in Colnett. We had a restful night and continued on with no problem the next day.

In 2014 I paused the fleet in Turtle Bay on cautions from Commanders’ Weather and other professional forecasters. All of them warned that there was a system, a week out and much farther to the south, that had a slight chance of potentially affecting us. So I kept the fleet in Turtle Bay for the night, during which time the storm eliminated itself as a threat. The next day we continued on.

Finally, in 2019, Tropical Storm Raymond was far south but possibly approaching Cabo San Lucas the day before the anchored fleet was to leave Bahia Santa Maria for the Cape. Despite the fact that all the professional forecasters predicted Raymond would hit Cabo as a mild tropical depression rather than a tropical storm, I decided that the possibility of strong winds hitting a very crowded anchorage in Cabo was unacceptable. With safety the ultimate concern, I had to cancel the last couple of days of the event.

The forecast arrived so far in advance that some of the boats that had berth reservations in La Paz had time to make their way 175 miles down to Cabo and then 135 miles up to La Paz. A few boats that had reservations in the marina at Cabo went there. The rest remained in Bahia Santa Maria, where they didn’t have more than 20 knots of wind from the tropical depression.

A key thing to remember is that tropical storms and hurricanes are now easy to predict far in advance, and they would have to come far to the north to reach the fleet. So in the very unlikely event of an approaching storm there would be plenty of time to take shelter or reverse course and run from it.

What are the chances of a tropical storm or a hurricane reaching Cabo San Lucas when the Ha-Ha fleet is slated to arrive? Or even Puerto Vallarta, which is much farther south? Per Gemini:

“Just like in Cabo San Lucas, direct landfalls or impacts from tropical storms and hurricanes north of Puerto Vallarta after November 15 are practically nonexistent in the modern historical record.”

I hope this addresses some of your concerns.

I’m sorry that I won’t be able to join you this year, so I’ll have to console myself with the fact I had a fantastic 31-year run. God, I love the Ha-Ha, which I consider one of the crowning achievements of my life.

Be safe; have fun!