Uninvited beach week guest?

As the Barretts prepare for our annual beach week in Emerald Isle, NC, the tropics seem to be "heating up" after a couple of weak July systems. We've vacationed together for probably 10 years now, but often it's been earlier in the summer (late May / early June, occassionally into July). That time is good for at least two reasons: one, the water (and air) are cooler (August is swelteringly hot!), and the risk of tropical cyclones is low.

So like any weather afficionado, I've been checking the long-range forecasts, esp. after the t-storms email list chatter up-ticked a few days ago with the 10-day prediction of a strong TC hitting the northern Leeward islands. Immediately after the chatter, the models backed off their predictions, but now it looks like the model consensus is to develop the tropical wave, currently a few hundred miles off Africa, into a pretty robust TC. At least 4 global models predict cyclogenesis and deepening, and their intensity solutions are similar: all develop it into a major hurricane. The spread between the models' track solutions, however, is very large: the Canadian Model takes the nascent TC and heads almost for Bermuda; the NOGAPS Model pushes it nearly due west across/just north of Barbados and into the central Caribbean; the GFS and ECMWF are remarkably similar, both heading to the east coast of Florida by next Sunday.

For our beach week, we need only worry about anything heading up the SE coast; right now, the entire north Atlantic is dominated by a huge and sprawling Azores-Bermuda high, anchored a few hundred miles off the west coast of Spain with an axis reaching nearly to Cuba. This ridge would steer any TCs mostly westward, and if it stays in place, coastal NC would be fine. Hopefully it will maintain itself, giving us a few days of nice swells from a TC that passes well to our south.