Tropical storms

When you look at historical tropical storm data, the ocean looks like a pretty rough place:



As usual though, the real answer is "it depends" and in this case it depends on the season. Although a clunky interface, the historical hurricane track query function at NOAA yields some very useful information.

The conventional wisdom is to head down the Baja peninsula into Mexico no earlier than November. I'll show you the NOAA data and you can see why.

Here are the tropical storms from 1948 to 2008 in September in the Baja region:


And October:


And November:


For a separate passage, here is the reason why conventional wisdom is that March/April is a fine time to head to the South Pacific Islands - same data set for March:


It is more difficult to graphically understanding "the Hurricane Season" for the S Pacific as I could find only one hurricane ever in February. Now, one hurricane is enough to kill me so I'm not suggesting we sail off to the S Pacific in February - but I don't get it yet.