Socotra in June

Getting there, and what is open

June is outside the October to April season and inside the khareef. The best-time guide names the specific mistake: booking June in the hope of catching the tail of the good season is the single most common planning error people make with Socotra, and it is not a risk worth carrying.

What closes is more than the weather. Almost every itinerary on the island is camping-based, and tents cannot be pitched or kept standing on exposed ground once the monsoon is in. Boat trips stop, which removes Shoab Beach, the Dihamri snorkelling and most of the coastal programme at once.

Sea and wind

June holds the largest month-to-month change in the record: the mean wind goes from 19.3 km/h in May to 39.7 km/h. Humidity reaches 79 percent, with days averaging 29.3 C and nights 25.6 C.

Neither coast is a refuge. Published research describes the south-west monsoon as raising high waves along the south coast and gale-force winds along the north, from June to September. The site's best-time guide puts the sustained wind at 50 knots and more; the grid cell behind the table above is too coarse to show local gusts, so its mean sits far below that.

Bloom and wildlife

The bottle tree is dormant, and the Socotra chameleon notes advise against June to September on access grounds rather than because of the animal's own cycle.

The month's real event is on the high ground, where nobody can reach it. The mountains take up to about 800 to 1,000 mm of moisture a year, much of it as fog, against 131 mm a year in this grid cell. The cell averages the lowland and the high ground together, so it misses the fog, and its 8 mm for June says nothing about the cloud sitting on the Haggeher.

Photography

There is no dependable access, so there is nothing to plan. The Haggeher fog banks the monsoon produces are described in the research as completely undocumented, because the months that make them are the months nobody can reach.