Where to Go in December: Best Watersports Bases

by Yannick SchrothAug 5, 20267 min read

Photo: Aleksei Mzhachev via Pexels (free license).

What December gives you on the water

December is reliable and expensive in equal measure, and the list separates the two halves of the month because they price very differently. December is dry-season starts and holiday pricing. The Caribbean, the Red Sea and Sri Lanka's south are all reliable, but late December is the single most expensive fortnight of the year. Every base here is included because its own guide names December as part of its working window, not because the weather is generally nice, and where a place is marginal we say so rather than padding the list to a round number.

Also good in December

• Boracay, at the start of its December to February peak.
• El Nido, as the December to May dry season begins.
• The Zambezi, in the last weeks of its August to December low-water season.

One season closes, and the southern day opens all the way up

December has a clean administrative fact behind it: the Atlantic hurricane season ends on 30 November, and so does the eastern Pacific's. On the National Hurricane Center's 1991–2020 progress table the average Atlantic season's fourteenth and final named storm is dated 19 November. For Rincón and Cabo de la Vela that is the switch: the basin that spent the autumn making storms spends the winter making the long-period north swell those coasts are known for, with no season officially open behind it.

South of the equator December is the opposite of a wind-down. At Futaleufú the Naval Observatory has the sun up 06:02 to 21:23 on 15 December, 15 hours 21 minutes, and still 15 h 22 by the 28th. Fifteen hours of usable light on a river that takes a full day to run properly is the actual reason the southern-summer rafting season is built around this month.

Two hemispheres, one calendar page, and the reason a December list reads stranger than any other month's.

One cyclone season ends in December and another one is in the middle of it

“The hurricane season is over” is the usual reason given for December, and for the Atlantic it is true. It is also the smaller half of the picture, because the same weeks are the main storm season of a different ocean, and several of the destinations people book in December sit in it.

The India Meteorological Department is explicit about the calendar. The southwest monsoon runs “June to September” and delivers “about 75% of the country's annual rainfall”. What follows is the reversal: “after the withdrawal of SWM upto 15°N, reversal of low level winds from southwesterly to northeasterly occurs”, and the northeast monsoon season of “October to December (OND)” begins. For Tamil Nadu it is the main rainy season, carrying “48% (442.8 mm) of its annual rainfall”.

And this is the sentence that matters for a December trip: “the NEM season is also the primary cyclone season for the North Indian Ocean (NIO) basin comprising of the Bay of Bengal (BOB) and the Arabian Sea (AS)”. December is inside that season, not after it.

Read together with the Atlantic dates above, December is not a month without storms. It is a month in which the storm risk has moved, and the practical consequence is that the reason for choosing a December destination should be that destination's own season rather than a general sense that winter is safe:

• The Caribbean and the Gulf are out of their season, which is why the region's dry window opens now.
• The Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, Sri Lanka's east and north, the Indian coast, the head of the Andaman Sea: are in theirs. That does not make them a bad choice; it makes the local forecast worth reading rather than assuming.
• South of the equator, December is early summer and the start of the southern cyclone season, which is a third calendar again.

The general point is worth more than the month: “out of season” is a statement about one basin, and every ocean keeps its own. A page like this one can only tell you where the seasons sit; the forecast on the week you travel is the one that decides.