I'm hoping for a track over the mountainous areas of Cuba to rip it up fairly good but taking a dispassionate look at the WV loop I don't see it happening.

The path just south of Cuba and either into the slot or just east of it looks right through the next three days or so. That's very bad news in that it likely sticks a Cat 3 into the southern Gulf in about 3-4 days.

Beyond that its more fluid; I can see an argument for the further-west path but the GFDL is the closest to my thinking at the present time, and that's very un-good, as a quite-small deviation east on that means that I get to meet Gustav personally, and I'd really rather not. The ugly is that someone's going to get some really bad news in the next week or so; I don't see how that is avoided.

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