Hurricane Bill became a Category 4 storm as it rumbled across the Atlantic early Wednesday with maximum sustained winds near 135 mph -- but forecasters still see it veering away from the East Coast.

By week's end, however, New England and Nova Scotia may have to weather a swipe by what is expected to be, by then, a weaker Bill. Both coastlines remain within the five-day path projected by the National Hurricane Center.

For South Florida, the remains of Ana posed the more immediate annoyance. The disorganized wave pushed toward the coast with patches of heavy rain, winds up to 20 mph and seas pushing six feet.

The National Weather Service posted small craft warnings and warned of a high risk of rip tides along beaches in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. The rain chance from Tuesday night until Wednesday afternoon: 80 percent.

But Bill is the big concern -- mainly for the island of Bermuda.

The storm, 1,825 miles from Miami, was moving west-northwest at 15 mph on a track expected to turn north well off from Puerto Rico and the Leeward Islands.

Computer models predicted that Bill would begin to turn on Wednesday, steering away from the U.S. coast into a break in a high-pressure system. There is a question of when that will happen, with the key being the timing of the jet stream, an upper-level trough digging east that is expected to pull Bill more sharply north.

Forecasters caution that long-range forecasts can vary by hundreds of miles, and that a late-arriving or weaker trough could move Bill's powerful and sharply defined eye closer to the East Coast.

Bill is a large storm, with hurricane-force winds extending up to 45 miles outward from the eye, and tropical storm-force winds reaching out 175 miles, the hurricane center said.

Moving through an accommodating atmospheric environment, Bill was shaping up as ``a very impressive and symmetric hurricane in satellite imagery,'' forecasters wrote.

By Saturday, when it would be north of Bermuda on its current path, Bill would be churning through cooler waters that, forecasters say, would sap its strength, possibly back down to Category 1 power.

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