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Why Your Cebu to Bohol Ferry Is Cancelled on a Clear Day (The Signal No. 1 Rule)

The most common complaint from travellers in the central Philippines is some version of this: the sky over Cebu was clear, the sea in the harbour was flat, and the ferry to Bohol was cancelled anyway. It reads like incompetence. It is not. It is a written rule, and once you know it you can predict your own cancellations better than the ticket counter can explain them. The rule Sailing during heavy weather in the Philippines is governed by a Coast Guard memorandum circular, originally 02-2013 and since revised as 02-23, titled Guidelines on Movement of Vessels During Heavy Weather. The provision that matters to a tourist is this one, as quoted in Philippine reporting of each suspension: No vessel of any type or tonnage shall be allowed to sail except to take shelter when Public Storm Warning Signal Number 1 or higher is hoisted within its point of origin, the intended route, or its point of destination. Read the last part again. Origin, route, or destination. Any one of the t...
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Hoi An Flooded Three Times in Twenty Days: What the 2025 Season Actually Looked Like

Every guide to central Vietnam tells you that October and November are the flood months. None of them tell you the thing that actually matters for planning, which is that a flood in Hoi An is not one event. In 2025 the town flooded three times in twenty days. That changes the decision completely. If flooding were a single event, you could shift your dates by a week and miss it. It is not, and you cannot. Below is the 2025 season reconstructed from dated Vietnamese reporting, because reading the reports in sequence shows something that none of them says on its own. The 2025 season, day by day Date What was recorded 26 Oct 2025 Flooding begins across the coastal provinces 27 Oct 2025 Bach Dang, Tran Phu and Nguyen Thai Hoc streets submerged; some areas reported at nearly 3 metres. Tourists wade out waist-deep. Hotels and homestays move guests by boat to higher ground. Authorities expect the third-level flood alert to be passed within 12 to 24 hours. 28 Oct 2025 Water exceeds 1....
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Okinawa Typhoon Reality: Why Residents Say One Day and Visitors Lose a Week

Search "Okinawa typhoon" and you get two answers that cannot both be true. Residents tell you to plan for one bad day. Travellers describe being stuck for a week with no flight and no hotel. Both groups are telling the truth, and the gap between them is the single most useful thing to understand before you book an August trip. This post works through what actually happened in the two most disruptive recent storms, Khanun in August 2023 and Dolphin in August 2026, using official figures and the accounts of people who were on the island. Every number is linked to its source. Where two sources disagree, that is noted rather than smoothed over. The two storms, side by side Both were August typhoons that closed Naha Airport. The impact figures are not remotely comparable.   Khanun (Aug 2023) Dolphin (Aug 2026) Naha Airport closed Two days All day 7 August Flights cancelled 400+ on one day 500+ Passengers affected 65,000+ Not published Households without power About on...
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The 2026 Typhoon Season So Far (What the Official Record Shows)

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Five named storms formed in the western Pacific between January and May 2026. The ten-year average for those months is 1.6. That is a little over three times the normal rate, and it happened with an unusual regularity: exactly one named storm in each of January, February, March, April and May. Two of the last ten years — 2016 and 2025 — produced none at all in that window. The early season, counted Season Named storms, January–May 2016 0 2017 1 2018 3 2019 2 2020 1 2021 3 2022 2 2023 2 2024 2 2025 0 2016–2025 average 1.6 2026 5  (Nokaen, Penha, Nuri, Sinlaku, Hagupit — one per month) Counts computed for this page from the RSMC Tokyo best track archive , downloaded 26 September 2026. Method: every system reaching tropical-storm grade or higher, counted once, by the year and month in which it first reached that grade. The 2026 file is finalised only to 19 May 2026 — see the section below. For scale, the same archive gives a ten...
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Typhoon Insurance Claims (Documents to Collect on the Day)

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Insurers do not dispute that there was a typhoon. They dispute what it cost you and whether your policy covered that particular consequence, and both of those are settled by paperwork that has a short shelf life. The airline's cancellation notice, the hotel's written confirmation, the official warning timestamp — all of these are easy to obtain on the day and progressively harder every day afterwards. A claim is mostly decided in the twenty-four hours when nobody feels like doing admin. What a claim actually turns on Three questions decide most weather claims, and none of them is "was there a storm". When did you buy the policy relative to when the storm became known? Most travel policies exclude events that were already foreseeable when cover started. Once a system is named and forecast toward your destination, it is generally a known event and a policy bought after that point will not cover it. This site has a fuller piece on what travel insurance usually cove...
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A Typhoon Kit for a Southeast Asian Apartment (What to Have)

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Nearly every storm preparation list in English assumes a detached house with a garage, a car, and a supermarket you drive to. Plywood for the windows. A generator. Sandbags. None of that applies to a fifteenth-floor apartment in Manila or Hanoi, where you cannot board the windows, cannot run a generator, and the shop is downstairs. The failure modes are different, and so the kit is different. What actually fails in an apartment Start from the failures rather than from a list, because the list falls out of them. Power goes, and with it the lift and the water. This is the one people underestimate. Most mid- and high-rise buildings in the region pump water to a roof tank. No power, no pump, and within a day the tank is empty. You lose water some hours after you lose electricity, which feels like a second, separate disaster and is in fact the same one. This site has a piece on how long power actually stays out after a typhoon and why the last stretch takes weeks , and everything in t...
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How to Read PAGASA's 5-Day Track Forecast (A Walkthrough)

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A five-day track forecast contains four separate claims, and most people read it as though it contains one. There is a line, a shaded area around the line, a set of labels on the line, and a set of coloured areas on land. They are produced by different processes, they carry different levels of confidence, and the one people fixate on — the line — is the least reliable thing on the map. The four things on the map The line is the forecast position of the centre at each future time step, joined up. It is the single most likely path of one point. It is not a route, it is not a corridor, and the storm is not steered along it. The cone is the area around the line inside which the centre is expected to fall most of the time, based on how wrong forecasts of that lead time have been historically. It is a statement about forecast error, not about the size of the storm. This distinction is the single most consequential misreading in the whole product, and this site has a longer ...
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