November is the best-kept part of the Mexican year. The south swell has faded from its summer size, the hurricane season closes at the end of the month, and what replaces both is wind: the dry season brings settled offshore mornings to the Oaxaca coast, and Zicatela returns its highest figure of the year, sixteen clean days out of thirty.
That is a different proposition from July. The wave is still what it is, over the same sandbar and with the same lack of margin, but it is coming in at a size a competent surfer can read rather than one that reads them. For anybody who has wanted to surf Puerto Escondido rather than photograph it, this is the month the town does not advertise.
The north coast has not stopped either. Nayarit is a month past its peak and still working on the last of the autumn swell before the winter north-west pattern takes over in December.
