About Holbox Nowcast

Holbox Nowcast is an independent travel information project, built and maintained by WASD Studio. We write it as reporters, not as salespeople. What you will find here is live data, weather context, applied marine biology, current regulations, and honest observations about an island we genuinely care about.

To be clear from the start: we are not a tour operator, we are not a hotel, we are not a travel agency. We do not sell whale shark tickets, we do not rent kayaks, we do not manage properties. We are a small team dedicated to gathering the information a traveler needs to make safe, sustainable, and informed decisions before and during a visit to Isla Holbox.

Most travel content about Holbox on the internet is outdated, copy-pasted from other pages, written without checking sources, or outright sponsored without disclosure. We want to change that. Our mission is to democratize access to real-time weather, oceanographic, and environmental data backed by primary, scientific sources, so that anyone considering a visit to the island can make decisions with the same information an oceanographer or a thirty-year veteran local guide would have.

If you come to swim with whale sharks, you should know when it is legal, how many boats operate under concession, what temperature the water is, and whether there is sargassum that day. If you come for the bioluminescence, you should know the moon phase and which plankton was expected that week. That information exists, but it is scattered across government agencies, research centers, and databases almost nobody checks. Our job is to gather it, translate it into plain language, and present it in one place.

There are plenty of Holbox guides. Few integrate real data. Here is what sets us apart:

Immersive 3D dashboard with live data: weather forecast, sea state, satellite-detected sargassum concentration, active hurricane warnings, and moon phase, all in a single view updated every five minutes.

Academic source citation: every numerical claim you will find on our pages traces back to a recognized scientific or governmental source. We do not invent numbers and we do not copy them from travel blogs.

Honest, pragmatic tone: if it rains in September, we say so. If there is sargassum in June, we say so. If a beach is choppy during norte season, we say so. We do not sell a postcard paradise; we explain the real island.

Four-language coverage: Spanish, English, French, and German, written separately for each language, not carelessly translated.

We work exclusively with primary sources and recognized authorities:

Open-Meteo for high-resolution global weather forecasts. LANOT-UNAM (the National Earth Observation Laboratory of Mexico's National Autonomous University) for satellite-based sargassum detection across the Caribbean. NOAA NHC (National Hurricane Center) for tropical cyclone and active hurricane tracking. SEMAR (Mexican Navy Secretariat) for sea state, swell, and maritime alerts. CONAGUA SMN (National Meteorological Service) for official Mexican forecasts. CONANP (National Commission for Protected Natural Areas) for information about the Yum Balam Biosphere Reserve, of which Holbox is part. And NOM-171-SEMARNAT-2018, the official Mexican regulation that governs whale shark encounters.

These are the sources used by the scientists, coast guards, and protected-area managers themselves. They are not blogs, not forums, not influencers. They are institutions with legal responsibility over the data they publish.

We commit to five non-negotiable principles: accuracy (every claim must be verifiable), transparency (we disclose where each number comes from and how the site is funded), editorial independence (recommendations do not depend on commissions), integrity (if we get something wrong, we fix it and note the correction publicly), and traveler safety (if an activity is dangerous on a given date, we say so even if that means you cancel a booking).

Holbox is not just any island. It is part of the Yum Balam Biosphere Reserve, a fragile ecosystem that shelters flamingos, sea turtles, whale sharks, crocodiles, and a coastal microfauna that few places in the Caribbean still keep intact. Its microclimate, shaped by the Yucatan current and the northern winds, makes it unique. Poorly managed tourism can destroy all of this in a single decade. That is why we take accurate information seriously: travelers who arrive knowing what to protect leave a much smaller footprint than travelers who arrive without context.

If you have questions, corrections, suggestions, or if you want to propose a serious editorial collaboration, you can write to us at hola@nowcast.day. We read every message and reply to the ones we can. If you spot an error in any of our data, let us know: we will fix it and note the correction publicly. See our editorial policy to understand how we work.