Travel alert
Everyone plans around hurricanes. Far more visitors get caught out by the winter wind event that stops the ferry for two days in February.
Between roughly mid-November and mid-March, a norte arrives with a winter front: a strong northerly wind pushing straight down the Cozumel Channel. It usually lasts a day or two. Its effect on a holiday is out of all proportion to how it looks from a hotel balcony.
Never schedule the Playa del Carmen ferry for the same day as an international flight between November and March. Leave a buffer night on the mainland, or fly in and out of Cozumel's own airport, which keeps operating in wind that closes the port to boats.
People get stuck here every winter and almost all of them had no margin in the plan. The ones who cope are the ones who built in a day.
A norte is not a washout. Air temperatures stay in the low eighties, the rain is usually light or absent, and the island simply reorganises itself. It is a good day for San Gervasio, for the museum on the malecón, for Punta Sur's lighthouse with the wind coming up the coast, or for the interior of the island where the trees take the edge off it.
Divers should ask the shop the night before rather than turning up at the dock. Most will move you to a near-town shallow site or reschedule without argument, because they would rather do that than take a boat out in it.
Bring a layer. An evening on the malecón in February with a norte blowing is genuinely cool, and visitors who packed for the Caribbean are the ones buying sweatshirts.
SourcingSummarised from the long-established seasonal pattern of northerly wind events on the Quintana Roo coast and from the standing practice of port closures ordered by the local maritime authority. Closures are announced case by case and are not on a schedule; follow the ferry operators' live service notices and your accommodation's advice on the day.
Plan around it
The pages that carry the practical detail behind this story — hours, costs, access and where it sits on Cozumel.
Things to do
Getting around Cozumel: fixed taxi zone fares from the piers, what a jeep costs with insurance, the Playa del Carmen ferry and driving the…
Things to do
When to visit Cozumel: water temperature and visibility month by month, hurricane season, the winter nortes that close the port, and the…
Things to do
Cozumel is a drift diving island and the current does the work. Palancar, Santa Rosa and Punta Sur, what a two-tank day costs, and…
Things to do
How San Miguel de Cozumel works: the numbered street grid, the plaza and malecon, where prices drop inland, the ferry pier, and the town…
Newsroom
Travel alert
The season is six months long and the real risk sits in three of them. Cozumel is one of the first calls a cruise line drops, and that is the system working.
Travel alert
A daily wristband, no gloves, no touching coral, and the starfish at El Cielo stay in the water. Four rules that decide what the reef looks like in twenty years.