Hi all, was hoping to get out a week earlier but looks like I may need to delay for a week. I know these things are hard to predict but it looks like this year's hurricane season will be a pretty bad one. What are your thoughts on sailing the BVIs in mid to late July? I know hurricane season officially starts in June. I have sailed once in Early July and the weather was amazing. Just wondering how much of a risk am I taking on by booking that late in July?

Thanks!

The actual hurricane season is far shorter than the "insurance hurricane season". This is all about statistics and probability, so it is always a question of risk. Frequency of hurricanes follows a standard bell curve:


You can see that the frequency for July remains very low. In addition, modern weather forecasting systems and models have gotten a lot more reliable and semi-accurate storm paths can be calculated many days out. Taking all these factors into account, I'd charter in the BVI in July. I'd be cognizant of the weather and the charter base will have a plan to get you (well, the boat) back into base if the weather looks iffy.

The truth is that no one can tell you. You can look up how many hurricanes have happened during a particular month in the past, but that is no guarantee of anything. Obviously, September is dead high season, but hurricanes happen when and where they want to. Not so much lately, but we used to travel to the Caribbean almost every year in either September or October. We only had two vacations at all impacted by hurricanes.

One-We were on a (big ship) cruise during Luis in 1991. We were due to visit the Eastern Caribbean and ended up in the Western Caribbean instead. It was very odd, as it was DEAD flat calm throughout the Western Caribbean. We mused at the time that it seemed like Luis had sucked all the life out of the rest of the Caribbean. Back then, the internet wasn't what it is today, and we had no idea at the time of the massive destruction that was being wrought in the Eastern Caribbean, while we sailed on dead calm waters.

Two--And do you know when the only time was that we had a vacation really impacted by a hurricane? Lenny--on NOVEMBER 17, 1999. We had to leave early from St John, in advance of the storm. It turned out that St John did not really suffer that much damage, but they wanted to get a convention of lawyers off the island ASAP.

Zanshin--your post was much more helpful than mine, obviously!

Awesome, that graph is extremely helpful, thank you Zanshin

RMS Rhone went down on Oct 29 (1867)

Here is some interesting data focused on Tortola and Caribbean. Bertha was the last big storm to hit in July. Direct hit Cat 1 on July 8th in 1996. Other than that probability is very low.

https://stormcarib.com/climatology/TUPJ_all_isl.htm

As Zanshin stated, modern hurricane forecasting is much more accurate than it used to be also. If there is a named storm, you should be able to cancel. Although a last minute cancellation would be extremely disappointing, so long as one has insurance, it would just be a huge mental let down.