August is the biggest month on the Oaxaca coast. The southern swell is still arriving, and on top of it the eastern Pacific hurricane season is at its most active: systems spinning up a few hundred kilometres offshore send short, steep, close-range swell into Puerto Escondido, and that combination is what produces the days people photograph.
It is also what produces the days people should stay out of. A hurricane swell arrives faster and with less warning than a southern groundswell, the water moving across the sandbar is doing something different from what it did yesterday, and the rains have started, so the rivers are pushing out and the currents change again.
Nayarit, meanwhile, is warm, green, wet and quiet, at 30°C and its own annual maximum. Both coasts read the same temperature this month and mean nothing like the same thing by it.
