Hurricane Rina weakens near Mexican beach resorts

CANCUN, Mexico (Reuters) - Hurricane Rina weakened on Wednesday off Mexico's Caribbean coast where the approaching storm has prompted evacuations and flight cancellations for tourists visiting popular resorts like Cancun.

Rina was downgraded from a Category 2 storm to Category 1, the lowest rung of the Saffir-Simpson scale, with its winds dropping to 85 mph, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center said.

Cancun's airport stayed open, but more than a dozen inbound flights were canceled, and hundreds of passengers loaded with luggage formed long lines at airport counters.

"We recommend that people thinking of traveling just now do not. They should try and change their reservations for another occasion," Juan Carlos Gonzalez, secretary of tourism in Quintana Roo state, which includes Cancun, told Milenio television.

Rina is not expected to affect Mexico's main oil installations in the Gulf of Mexico or coffee-growing areas in Central America that were battered by heavy rains this month. All of Mexico's ports in the Gulf of Mexico, including major oil exporting terminals, were open on Wednesday afternoon.

People were urged not to go to Cancun's airport unless they had confirmed reservations. But that did not deter many tourists hoping to make it onto packed flights leaving ahead of the storm, which is expected to be near or over the coast on Thursday.

Danielle Selvin, 23, and Justin Harris, 25, from Los Angeles, decided to cut their three-week visit short by one week when they learned about Rina.

"We just figured that we'd rather be home where it's dry and the sun is still shining," said Selvin as the couple stood in line to try to get a refund for their original flight.

Vacationers already at the beaches along the coast of Yucatan's peninsula were met with cloudy skies and sporadic heavy rains. Beaches near the hotel zone were empty at mid-day, and some shops were beginning to close.

Cancun was devastated in 2005 by Hurricane Wilma, the most intense storm ever recorded in the Atlantic, and residents still have keen memories of the damage.

"After Wilma, how could I be afraid of this storm?" said soft drink salesman Mario Gomez, 45. "Even that day, I was the last one to leave. I didn't want to go before all my fruit was sold and I still have cold drinks to sell today. I'll be here tomorrow, too."

RAIN AND BIG WAVES

Even with the downgrade, Rina is still expected to cause downpours and potentially dangerous waves.

Most schools in Quintana Roo closed as a safety measure and the governor ordered hundreds of people to evacuate the fishing village of Punta Allen about 150 km (93 miles) south of Cancun, where a hurricane warning was in effect.

About 2,800 people were being evacuated from low-lying Holbox Island, off the Yucatan's northeastern tip, including 200 tourists, Quintana Roo's governor Roberto Borge said.

On Tuesday there were around 80,000 tourists in the state. Most were foreigners, staying at hotels in Cancun and other resorts like Playa del Carmen and the island of Cozumel, popular with scuba divers and cruise ships.

Some cruises changed course to avoid Yucatan.

The sixth hurricane in the 2011 Atlantic season, Rina was located about 170 miles south southeast of Cozumel Island at 4 p.m. CDT/2100 GMT on Wednesday, and was moving west northwest at 6 mph.

The hurricane could dump 8 to 16 inches of rain over the eastern Yucatan peninsula, and some streets in the main tourist zone were already flooding on Wednesday.

A huge storm surge is also possible, raising tide levels as much as 4 feet above normal along the coast.

The director of Mexico's West Coast National Marine Park, Jaime Gonzalez, said the hurricane would probably accelerate the erosion of Cancun's famous white-sand beaches, which the government has rebuilt twice after Wilma stripped away nearly 60 percent of Cancun's sand.

Companies that run marine parks around Cancun moved more than two dozen dolphins, some pregnant, from areas in the hurricane's path to safer sites farther inland.

Belize issued a tropical storm watch along its coastline north of Belize City but other Central American countries are not in the storm's forecast path. A warning was also issued for the Honduran bay islands of Roatan and Guanaja.

Downpours that started on October 12 over Central America have affected more than 1 million people, destroying crops and damaging roads in the region, the United Nations said.

(Additional reporting by Anahi Rama; writing by Dave Graham and Mica Rosenberg; editing by Xavier Briand)