There is a lot of weather tied up in New Zealand place names. The screaming northwest gales of Canterbury are celebrated with names like Windwhistle, near the Rakaia Gorge, Mount Blowhard, near Oxford, and Nervous Knob, near Castle Hill, where gusts of 240 km per hour have been measured.

Fine weather gets a mention with Sunnynook and Sunnyvale, both near Auckland. We have a Misty Peak and a Cloudy Bay and rainbows are well represented, being used to name an island, a mountain, a lake and a pass. Rain itself is harder to come by but can sometimes be found in the story that gave rise to a name.

Photo courtesy of New Zealand Geographic

Fittingly, several of these occur in rainy Fiordland. Monkey Creek, for example, commemorates a downpour that flooded a creek and washed away a surveyor’s dog, called Monkey, who fortunately made it back to camp the next day. Also in Fiordland Stick-up Creek was named by Martin’s Bay settlers, who were held up by a flood, while Mount Soaker speaks for itself.

In May 1773 James Cook laconically named Wet Jacket Arm in Dusky Sound after a storm forced an exploring party to stay out overnight. In Lieutenant Pickersgill’s words “On the 7th I went with the Pinnance to explore a Sound, expecting to get back on the same Night but was disappointed for it came on a very violent storm of Snow Hail and Thunder with a meer Hurrican of wind which confined us in a little Cove, and what was worse we had nothing to eat but a few Mussels which we gathered from the Rocks and nothing to drink but spring water; in this situation we were kept for 36 hours, quite wet and the woods so wet we could not get a bit of fire to burn and being entirely exposed to the inclemency of the weather.”

The naturalist, Forster, was rattled by the ferocity of the storm “ it seemed as if all nature was hastening to a general catastrophe … our hearts sank with apprehension lest the ship might be destroyed by the tempest and its aetherial fires, and ourselves left to perish in an unfrequented part of the world.”

There is also a storm hidden behind Cook’s naming of Hawke’s Bay. First Lord of the Admiralty, Edward Hawke, rose to fame as the only naval commander in the age of sail to initiate a battle in a full gale.  In November 1759, Hawke ordered his fleet to pursue the French as they retreated into Quiberon Bay seeking a safe harbour. The English ships crammed on so much sail in the chase that some of them sustained damage. The seas were so large that water entered some ships through their gun-ports. One of the French ships capsized and sank in a squall when this happened while the English ships managed to right themselves and shed the water.

Caught off balance by the audacity of Hawke’s attack the French Admiral never regained the initiative. The result was a crushing victory, which ended all hope the French had of transporting their large army of invasion to England. Had the English not won the war, some historians speculate that the USA might be speaking French today and not English.

There are also a host of Maori weather stories in New Zealand place names, as a trawl through A.W. Reed’s excellent Place Names of New Zealand will show. Kaihau-o-Kupe near Wanganui remembers a time when Kupe was held up by persistent westerly gales and rough water and had to “eat the wind” as he had no food with him.

Tongaporutu near Waitara translates as “driving into the south wind at night” and was given by the explorer Whatonga when he was sailing down the west coast searching for his grandfather Toi.

Upokopoito near Wanganui translates as “calabash heads”. The story goes that a red-headed chief heard that fishermen had mockingly compared him to a red gurnard. A tohunga obliged the chief by calling up a gale that swamped the fishermen, whose heads bobbing in the water looked like calabashes.

The Maori name for Wellington’s Mount Victoria is Tangitekeo, literally “the sound of the peak” as this was where the taniwha Whaitaitai screamed, a sound like the howling of the wind.

As befits a country astride the roaring forties, many names reference the wind. The Maori name for Solander Island in Fovueax Strait is Hautere, or flying wind while elsewhere there is a Hauiti, or little breeze, a Haunui, big wind or frequent wind and a Haumoana or sea wind.

Quite a few names commemorate misfortune, such as the numerous coastal features named after ships wrecked in storms: Benvenue Cliffs near Timaru; Buffalo Beach in the Coromandel and Union Bay near Auckland.

Mount Paske is named after a surveyor who lost his life in a snowstorm while Canterbury’s Jason’s Creek remembers a man who got severe frostbite cutting firewood and had both legs amputated at the knees.

Graveyard Gulley near Alexandra is named for two travellers killed in a snowstorm while Deadmans Terrace, on the Shotover River, is where eleven gold prospectors were killed in a horrendous flood.

A touch of humour is evident in The Gluepot, which occurs in Otago and Westland for places where carts were regularly bogged down after rains turned to roads to quagmires.

Among the many names bestowed during the voyage of the survey ship HMS Acheron in the 1840s was Blanket Bay in Fiordland, after a blanket of fog encountered there. Acheron made its way into several place names and was originally the name of a river in the Greek Underworld. Interestingly, some scholars believe the syllable ach goes back thousands of years further and is an Indo-european root word associated with streams that gave rise to the latin word aqua.

Perhaps the most delightful discovery in Reed’s book concerns a place on Banks Peninsula called Snefellness by a Danish whaling captain in 1840. It means a promontory surrounded by a snowfield and is now mispronounced as Snufflenose.

Rugby and fog do not go well together. Fortunately, in the days when rugby was played in the afternoon, they did not meet up much, except for the occasional test in Scotland when the All Blacks disappeared into the “gloom” as they scampered in a late try.

However, the introduction of night-time rugby gave fog a chance to get on the field for some game time. Especially in the United Kingdom, where evening games sometimes have to be cancelled when fog turns up.

In New Zealand, fog showed us what it could do when it rolled into Christchurch an hour before the kickoff of the Super 14 final between the Hurricanes and the Crusaders on 27 May 2006.

As a television spectacle the event was seriously compromised. The cameras down at ground level sometimes got a reasonable view but those high up were mostly obscured. Nicknamed “gorillas in the mist” the contest was won 19-12 by the Crusaders.

The Hurricanes, who do not have much fog of their own as it is usually too windy in Wellington, also got to suck up some Hamilton fog at the end of the Super 14 semi-final against the Chiefs in May 2009, which they also lost. Situated on a river, with swamps nearby, Hamilton is the most fog prone major city in New Zealand. After Hamilton, Christchurch is the next foggiest because it is close to the sea, so the air is often very humid.

Fog formation is helped when there are a lot of condensation nuclei in the air. Many of these come from tiny plants in the sea known as phytoplankton. When tiny animals, known as zooplankton, nibble phytoplankton the chemical dimethylsulfoniopropionate is released into the water. There it changes to dimethyl sulphide (DMS) which gets into the atmosphere when breaking waves throw small water droplets into the air, where they evaporate.

In the air, DMS changes to four different chemicals, three of which act as cloud condensation nuclei. DMS also helps make the characteristic smell of the air at the beach.

Fog: Photo copyright Pernell Hartly

Smoke particles can also act as condensation nuclei. Indeed, the celebratory fireworks after the Crusaders victory resulted in a temporary thickening of the fog in Christchurch. During the Napoleonic wars so much smoke was produced by the massed cannon-fire that fog would sometimes envelope the battle field giving rise to the term “the fog of battle”.

Before the clean air laws were enacted, smoke from coal fires and industry used to cause the famous pea-soup fog in London. In December 1952, a notorious fog lasting for days was blamed for 4000 fatalities, mostly from bronchitis and pneumonia. Breathing this particular fog actually caused pain as a portion of the 1000 tons of dirt particles suspended in the London air was sulphur dioxide which combined with water droplets and oxygen to form sulphuric acid.

Some playing-fields in Scotland have underground heating to prevent the soil freezing when frost strikes but there is not much you can do to prevent fog. During the Second World War a lot of effort went into discovering a way of clearing fog from airfields.

The only method that worked, and then only temporarily, was burning petrol sprayed from long pipes either side of the runway so that planes landed between walls of flame. But at nearly 30,000 litres of petrol per landing, it was prohibitively expensive.

Fog is just cloud resting on the ground, and clouds are often found resting on the mountains. So even before night rugby came to New Zealand there was one place where fog frequently turned up before game time and that was the coal mining settlement of Denniston, situated on a plateau 600 metres above sea-level on the South Island’s West Coast.

Although good for fog, Denniston was not a particularly good place for soil and grass. The rugby ground had been bulldozed out of rock and was covered in new load of sand brought up from the beach at the beginning of each season.

Rugby in the fog had certain disadvantages. A ball kicked high in the air, for example, would disappear and players have to wait around for the telltale thump to discover where it came back down.

There was, however, some home advantage. Visiting teams found playing in the persistent fog somewhat confusing, and if the game was going badly for the home team an extra player could be slipped on in the backline to stiffen the defence.

Nor was this astute use of local conditions restricted to the rugby team. An excellent soccer team from Millerton was once unable to make headway against Denniston until the fog lifted, revealing that Denniston had four extra players on the pitch.

The All Blacks were due to play Scotland in Auckland on 14 June 1975 when a major storm hit New Zealand. Torrential rain fell over many parts of the country inundating farmland from Northland to Canterbury. Roads in Northland were cut by floodwaters metres deep and the Mangakahia River rose 10 metres above normal.

Tragically, a 12 year old boy drowned on Auckland’s North Shore when he slipped into a flooded stream and was washed into a culvert. Surface flooding occurred in parts of Auckland. A million dollars worth of stock was destroyed when water entered the basement of a Nestlé’s warehouse and an old lake reformed in Remuera which proved suitable for dingy sailors while it lasted.

A tornado struck near Huntly, in the Waikato, knocking over a line of power poles and destroying a hay barn, parts of which flew over the heads of children playing nearby. A service station at Waerenga was ripped apart and a number of houses damaged. Fallen trees cut roads and brought down power and phone lines in many other parts of the country.

Slips and floodwaters cut roads in the Coromandel and some small boats were washed away at Te Kaha when large waves ran up beyond the high tide mark.

Cook Strait ferry sailings were cancelled due to the high winds around Wellington. Waves washed away shingle undercutting the railway line to the Hutt Valley and roads were closed at the northern end of the harbour by seas washing driftwood and seaweed over them.

The railway line between New Plymouth and Wanganui was cut by a washout while a slip closed the main trunk line south of Kaikoura. Slips also blocked the roads through the Buller Gorge and the Kawerau Gorge. Snow fell over inland Canterbury with 18cm accumulating on the road at Porter’s Pass and 46cm at Burke’s Pass.

At Auckland’s Eden Park, around 75mm of rain had fallen by kickoff. The ground had sold out but 10,000 spectators stayed away. Some spectators had to walk through ankle deep water to get to their seats. Consideration was given to postponing the game but conditions were not expected to be a lot better the next day and the Scots were booked to fly home on the Monday.

So the game went ahead although the referee blew up the rucks very quickly to avoid anyone drowning under a crush of bodies. The All Blacks turned on some great wet weather rugby winning 24-0. The first try was the result of a running move but the other three came from the classic tactic of kick and chase exploiting mistakes in the defence’s handling of the wet ball.

The ground held up surprisingly well and did not turn into a quagmire. Although the ball was slippery, it did not become so heavy as to prevent Joe Karam converting all of the All Blacks tries.

In the early days of rugby, wet balls often became hard to kick over the cross-bar. In the famous mud-battle at Athletic Park between the All Blacks and the Anglo-Welsh in 1908 the game finished a 3-3 draw when the visitor’s goal-kicker failed to convert a try between the posts as he barely raised the sodden ball out of the mud.

Wet weather used to be regarded as the great equaliser, giving a lesser team a chance against a stronger team. However, the introduction of synthetic balls in the 1980s restored the advantage. As well as being waterproof these new balls had thousands of dimples on their surface to improve the players grip when the ball was wet.

A classic example of the standard of play now possible on a wet ground was seen in the first tri-nations test played between the All Blacks and the Wallabies at Athletic Park in a wet southerly on 6 July 1996. The All Blacks ran in 6 tries to none winning 43-6 and were denied a chance at 50 points when the referee ended the game 3 minutes early when they were hot on attack.

Rugby’s ability to live with the rain has also improved enormously with modern turf engineering which allows the top test venues to drain water away at a rate undreamt of by previous generations. Nevertheless, extreme rainfalls from a thunderstorm can exceed 100mm in an hour so if a thunderstorm parked itself in just the right place at just the wrong time it could still cause trouble. Except, of course, in Dunedin where they have gone for the ultimate solution and put a roof over the ground.

The first test between the All Blacks and the Lions in 1930 was played at Dunedin’s Carisbrook Park just after a snowstorm. Rain started in the morning then turned to snow during the curtain raiser. It became almost impossible to make out the players and some of the crowd went home while others sheltered under blankets and umbrellas.

Part of the crowd shelter from one of the snow showers that fell before the match. Photo courtesy of NZ Observer

The snow eased to sleet as the test teams came onto the field then cleared soon after. However, the ground by this time was quite heavy and slippery making expansive back play difficult. The score was 3-3 going into the last minute. The All Blacks were hot on attack, when Great Britain’s Ivor Jones intercepted a pass and took off downfield. As he was tackled by George Nepia he passed to his winger who scored a spectacular try in the corner bringing the crowd to its feet and secured a 6-3 win for Great Britain.

The snow affected eastern areas of the South Island and was regarded as the heaviest in more than a decade. Southland and south Otago were worst hit with many roads closed, delaying spectators trying to return home after the test. Gore had 15 cm while some places as much as 23 cm. When the train carrying the Great Britain rugby team to Invercargill on the Sunday stopped at Gore, the players started a snowball fight amongst themselves before uniting and bombarding the crowd that had turned out to greet them.

The Great Britain team must have become well acclimatised to snow by the time of their game against Ranfurly Shield holders Southland on the Wednesday. There was a bitterly cold wind and further snow fell but Great Britain won 9-3.

The Southland rugby team were no strangers to snow and famously defeated Manawatu in a Shield defence in 1939 when the ground was covered in 10 cm of snow (see my previous blog).

A previous Great Britain team also had a close encounter with snow when it played Canterbury-South Canterbury-West Coast combined at Lancaster Park on 6 August 1904 in the opening game of its tour. Although the weather for the game was fine, snow had fallen earlier in the week and had to be cleared from the playing field.

Fortunately for the home team the snow had not been completely cleared from the in-goal area. Their only try was scored when a defender tried to kick the ball dead only for it to hit the snow and stop. Future All Black Bob Deans dived on it to score. However, the conversion failed and Great Britain won 5-3.

A year later, Deans scored the controversial try that was disallowed when the 1905 All Blacks suffered their only defeat, losing 0-3 to Wales.

While snow occasionally comes to the house of rugby, rugby sometimes goes to the house of snow. In Antarctica there is an annual rugby match between the scientists at Scott Base and those at McMurdo.  Played on a groomed snow surface on top of two metre thick sea ice the Ross Island Cup has been won by New Zealand for 27 years straight. The New Zealand supporters distribute “Rugby 101” leaflets to the US supporters to help them understand the rules.

Closer to home is the Glacier Country Cup disputed annually by seven aside teams the Cunning Foxes and the Franz Josef Eagles on a pitch 2340 metres above sea level. The players, crowd, goalposts, touch-lines and try-lines are all carried up by helicopters.

As winners of the latest match, The Cunning Foxes, hosted a Spanish women’s team, Unio Esportiva Santboiana from near Barcelona. The visitors carried the day with a running game the locals could not match. However, the Spanish women did not arrive in New Zealand entirely ignorant of our style of rugby as the sporting director of Unio Esportiva Santboiana is the former All Black hooker Bruce Hemera.