Hurricane Trudy was churning just off Mexico's southwestern Pacific coast this weekend, making its closest approach to shore Saturday night into Sunday and putting a stretch of coastline popular with American tourists on edge. The storm has lashed the region with heavy surf and rain even without a confirmed direct landfall, according to the Associated Press and Britain's ITV News.

Trudy's strength swung wildly in a matter of hours. It was a Category 1 storm with 75 mph winds on Thursday, rapidly intensified into a major Category 3 hurricane with roughly 120 mph winds by Friday morning, then was reassessed late Friday by the U.S. National Hurricane Center as a weaker Category 1 system with 90 mph winds after fresh satellite wind data came in. As of the most recent advisory cited by the AP, the storm's center sat roughly 210 miles southwest of Acapulco and about 290 miles south-southeast of Manzanillo, crawling north at just 7 mph.

A hurricane warning covers the coast from Manzanillo, Colima, north to Cabo Corrientes, Jalisco — a stretch that includes beach resorts near Puerto Vallarta — while a tropical storm warning extends further south to Zihuatanejo. Forecasters are warning of 4 to 8 inches of rain generally, with isolated totals near 15 inches possible across Michoacán, Colima and Jalisco, raising the risk of flash flooding and mudslides.

Ground already soaked

Trudy is the third tropical system to menace Mexico's Pacific coast in roughly a month, following Hurricane Simon, whose remnants dissipated near the tip of Baja California earlier in the week. Officials in Colima said the immediate risk from Trudy itself looked low, but cautioned that ground already saturated by the earlier storms could turn even modest additional rainfall into dangerous flooding and landslides.

Mexico's Navy urged coastal residents and the maritime community to "exercise extreme caution" because of high waves, heavy rain and the threat of flooding and landslides. The conflicting strength assessments — major hurricane one moment, weakened Category 1 the next — underscore how fast-changing and difficult to pin down Trudy has been for forecasters tracking it in real time.

The National Hurricane Center's outlook calls for some renewed strengthening as Trudy approached the coast through Saturday, with weakening expected to begin once the system pulls back over open Pacific waters around October 19. No landfall had been confirmed in the reporting reviewed, and Mexican meteorologists said as of midweek that the storm's core might stay offshore, passing within roughly 40 miles of the coast rather than making a direct hit — though the hurricane warning remained in force regardless given the storm's size and rain output.

For now, the bigger danger for coastal towns and the tourists who fill their hotels this time of year is less the wind than the water: mudslides on steep terrain, swollen rivers, and surf dangerous enough that Mexican authorities are telling people to stay off the beaches and out of the water until Trudy clears the coast.