St. Swithin's Day

July 15th is St. Swithin's day on which according to folklore:

St Swithin?s Day, if it does rain
Full forty days, it will remain
St Swithin?s Day, if it be fair
For forty days, t'will rain no more.

Well, here in Houston we are currently battening down the hatches in preparation for the edge of Hurricane Claudette, which will pass to the west of us.

This means that we will get the "dirty edge," full of high winds and torrential rain.

Already in the past 16 hours we have had about 7 inches of rain.
Typicaly we will get some cable and power outages which may mean I loose our internet connection.
All part of the wonderfully rich pagent of life known as being an expatriate.

Still, looking on the bright side, it is only 47 days until my next trip back to the UK.
Right now, facing about a 2 hours drive home in foul weather, those 47 days can not pass too quickly for my liking.

So,how has St. Swithin's day been in your neck of the woods?

Hot and sunny here Peter,it's been up to 86 F the last two or three days,but we did have a lot of thunder and a brief shower this evening

Bloody hot, OK if you are on holiday, but uncomfortable when having to wear a shirt and tie for work.

Hot and bloody sweaty bollock weather,roll on october.

Don't like this weather, although I did get 3 nice chub on the Don recently.

Roll on the typical wet British summer so we can get down to some serious barbelling.

Very hot and not many fish biting, forcast some rain today. (hopefully!)

Nice and hot up here in Cov. Very pleasant as the air con is actually working.

One thing though Peter, or anyone else that may be able to answer, why do the USA name hurricanes and then where do they get the name from? Something that's always made me think.

Adrian,

Hurricanes and Tropical Storms have been given names since 1953.
Until 1978 only girl's names were used.

The resoning for the naming convention was that in the 50's contact between the many different metrological stations around the North West Atlantic was mainly by radio and the names were much easier to refer to than latitude and longitude coordinates.

The World Metrological Society actually maintain 6 lists of names from, A to W, and the lists rotate, so that the list used in 2001 will also be used in 2007.

The only time that there is a change in the list is if a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate for reasons of sensitivity.

Claudette is the third I have experienced, the others being Andrew in 1992 on holiday in Miami, and Georges in 1998 whilst working on the gulf coast.

We were lucky this time as Claudette veered off to the West on making landfall, but it was still pretty "hairy" around here from about 20.00 until 01.00 this morning.

Just been talking to Tony Miles in Cov.

It's chucking it down. Hope it gets here tonight. This heat is giving me the willies.

thunder storm going of in leicester as i write this

Linking this thread to the latest Home page leader, I do wonder whether the weather has really changed or if it is just natural swings & roundabouts. I recall long hot summers in my youth but also washed out holidays and multiple thunderstorms.

One of the problems is that as soon as we get any period of extended hot or wet or cold weather the media go ballistic (nothing else to write about - you wouldn't think there are wars, famines and civil massacres going on all over Africa!)

Sorry about that I don't usually get political but a friend of mine has a family in Uganda that is currently hiding out in the bush because of Sudanese insurgents and not a peep in the press or on telly.

Back to fishing - I think this summer has been pretty good so far, yes the dry spell has just about outstayed its welcome but, hopefully, we'll get a good soaking tonight - then Barbel here I come.

And it came, that wonderful life giving wet stuff I love so much. Definitely an extended barbel session for me this weekend.

Doesn't the air smell wonderful after all that rain?

No doubt the BBC will be calling it "Bad Weather" as usual. What they should do is send all the the BBC employees to live in the middle of the Sahara if they call that good weather.

Bunch of Prats.