Cozumel - post-2005 hurricane season
Posted By Michael Marcotte on 26 September 2006
According to several news reports, 2005’s hurricane Wilma was the worst storm on record in the Atlantic Ocean. Local Cozumel residents told me that the eye passed directly over the island and sat there for hours. We traveled to the island in mid-June, 2006, expecting much of the same damage and sparse vegetation that we saw on our first trip to Cozumel in1989, which was on the heels of hurricane Gilbert. In contrast to those more expert opinions, I’m tempted to say that Gilbert was more destructive, not only to the beachfront hotels, but to the reef. Of course, it could be that since the dive industry has accelerated tremendously since 1989, the financial motivation for restoring the hotel properties has also been stepped up. Almost all of the larger hotels and resorts have already re-opened and first time visitors might not even notice that anything is amiss.
We arrived expecting palm-less trees trunks dotting the beach, haggard island vegetation, on-going hotel reparations like we had seen in 1989, and a somewhat lessened quality of dive. What a pleasant surprise to find only slightly noticeable remaining damage. I should, of course, acknowledge that I did not travel into town (San Miguel), other than during the taxi ride to and from the airport, and cannot fully report the status of the recovery there. After 16 trips to Cozumel, I rarely leave the all-inclusive resorts, anymore. From the poolside chatter about wild, gotta-go-there nights at Carlos & Charlie’s and other in-town entertainment venues, I gathered that a sufficient number of these establishments are back to business as usual, so that visitors who depend upon them for the quality of their trip will not be deterred. And while I did see a few crumpled businesses in town two hotel staff members told me that their homes further away from the beach in San Miguel had suffered only minimal or no damage.
Perhaps, due to similar expectations by other divers, both our resort, the Iberostar (which re-opened for post-hurricane business back in February ’06), and the reefs were less crowded with visitors than almost all of our last four or five trips to the island. Not that I have any more right to dive than anyone else, but I have to admit, I’m sort of glad that we ventured back before many of you. I enjoyed the less-crowded dive sites.
The reef system on the deeper dives like Palancar Caverns seemed largely unaffected by Wilma and the active 2005 hurricane season. The towering coral formations were just as majestic as ever, but since my strobe flooded in 1990, and the caverns are a ninety-foot dive, I can’t really prove that on film. I never replaced the strobe, because I already had sixty jillion bluish dive photos from ninety feet from 1989.
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