NORFOLK (AP) -- It was 4 a.m. on Sunday, and Bruce Richardson was standing in his yard, getting ready to make barbecue for his church and staring out across the Chesapeake Bay. He watched the rain pounding the water in the distance.
'I could see the storm coming across from Norfolk,' he said. 'It came this way, split, and went right around us.'
That's the way it's been happening lately on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Every stray shower, every thunderstorm, every bit of moisture seems to dry up and disappear before it ever hits land.
In fact, there hasn't been a significant 'moisture event' on the Shore since a snowstorm Dec. 26, said Bill Shockley, Virginia Tech extension agent in Northampton County.
'I think it went really bad about a month ago,' said Richardson, a farmer in Eastville. 'Two or three more days of this heat, and we'll lose the corn crop. You can watch the leaves curling in the field.'
Like farmers elsewhere in the state, those on the Eastern Shore are working now to harvest winter wheat. After that, they'll plant late soybeans. But you can't plant anything when you have no water. Even farm ponds have dried up after farmers used them to water earlier crops.
Many Shore farmers don't recall ever seeing it so dry and so hot so early. They wonder what's happening on this peninsula that juts into the Bay.
In the state climatology office at the University of Virginia, Jerry Stenger, the director, said he doesn't see things being much different from previous years. It's true that this year's heat came on hard and fast, he said, but we all have to be more patient and allow the weather patterns to play themselves out.
'Across most of Virginia, we've had a relatively dry winter,' Stenger said. 'But, fortunately, we've had a wet spring - except for the Tidewater area.'
The Eastern Shore, in this case, is included in the Tidewater area. That area is 6.73 inches below normal at Wallops Island, compared with 6.78 inches below normal in Hampton Roads. From Salisbury, Md., to Norfolk we all need rain, said meteorologist Lyle Alexander of the National Weather Service's forecast office at Wakefield.
'We don't have a very rosy outlook for summer, and it's unlikely it will improve,' Stenger said. 'Somebody has got to be short on rainfall.'
The rain-deficit numbers on the Eastern Shore and Hampton Roads are close, but unlike on the Eastern Shore, South Hampton Roads has been helped by scattered showers, like the one Sunday. One area can have a good soaking rain, while a mile away it remains bone dry.
'We're not as bad off as some other areas, because we were blessed with that inch of rain Sunday morning,' said Robbie Taylor, at Locust Grove Farm in Smithfield. 'There's no other way to put it. We were just blessed,' though he allowed that the crops could use some more rain.
The extremely dry weather is a problem farmers usually have in August, said Steve Sturgis, who has raised corn, wheat and soybeans in Northampton County for nearly 40 years.
'This is the driest I've seen it in all my days of farming.'
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Information from: The Virginian-Pilot, http://pilotonline.com
(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
