Sorry but I hate to say I'm right when I'm right, but it needs to be said that I was right about how little Cuba was going to touch this storm. In fact, it sped up for a little bit because it was always going to have a huge chunk of the upper left of the storm over water.

I only bring this up because I feel very...sensitive about how the third-world people from Puerto Rico (yes, I consider them 3rd world because the rest of the USA seems to treat them as such (note>I'm from Canada and can sense the...distaste all the way up here) and Cuba and the Dominican and any other country that basically act like hurricane breaks or half of these beasts would enter the Gulf at H3 or H4's before turning into H5's. Watching these unfortunate places get smashed time after time and entirely too many people don't really care about a storm until it's tracking for a continental USA hit is an understatement.

If you asked pretty much everybody about how many Cubans were killed from H3=Ian, the answer from damn near all of them would be..."errrrr, I don't know. It's really going to smoke Florida, though!"

People sit and hum and haw and wonder what's going to happen to a storm because outside of wind sheer/other wind messing with a storm, I can look at the wind and how hot the water is and TELL you what's going to happen to a storm because I've been doing it for 17 years now.. Personally, on large storms that stay over hot water, I'm over 80% right on a destination, give or take 50km from 3 days out. I maintain this level of success because when you drill it all down, a storm is all about water and wind. That's it.
Bands of storms get pulled out of the ocean from hot SST's and wind, and storms get knocked down from cool SST's and wind. The storms I'm wrong on are those that make their own weather despite conditions. The super large, big enough to be ripping storms out of the entire Gulf all at once kind of storms or smaller storms that wobble all over the place.

Note>I don't mean to sound cocky; I just point to the fact that I think people make forecasting storms entirely too complex. The Storm Hunters are now giving data on all four quadrants of a storm that people pour over and feed into models to see what they say when they can just look at the wind and the water, follow a strong model and then add some intelligence to what they SEE. Nobody seems to just LOOK anymore. As far as I'm concerned, every model is going to be wrong because every storm is different and completely archaic.

Certainly, I recommend that people use some modelling, but people need to go back to using their eyes and some common sense too.

In my opinion, which of course is going to get attacked, but hey, I'll trust my 80% forever.