ROCHESTER, N.Y. - In the Northeast, the soggy summer of 2004 was a duck's delight, a farmer's dismay, a drag on the tourism trade and a Shangri-La for mosquitoes.

It was wetter than usual in June, July and August in 10 out of 12 Northeastern states - the exceptions were Connecticut and West Virginia. On average, 14.3 inches of rain bucketed down, 2.2 inches more than the norm, making it the seventh wettest summer on record.

The wettest state was Delaware with 16 inches, followed by Pennsylvania (15.9), Maryland (15.8), Vermont (15.5) and New York (14.6), climatologist Keith Eggleston of the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University said Tuesday.

It was the fourth wettest summer in 110 years in Pennsylvania, the fifth wettest in New York and the eighth wettest in Vermont. The driest spot was Rhode Island, with 11.3 inches of rain.

The extra moisture brought added benefits - far fewer forest fires, smaller air-conditioning bills, springier grass for soccer enthusiasts - but it also left corn tasting a little watery, swelled Labor Day worries about insect viruses and put a damper on vacations.

"When people are committed to get away, they do that, but if the weather is not to their liking, then I think what we see is an abbreviated trip," said Dan Murphy, president of the New York State Hospitality and Tourism Association, which detected a dip in hotel stays in August.

It was also a cooler summer - 0.9 degrees below the 67.6-degree Fahrenheit norm in the Northeast, Eggleston said.

That might have helped to keep mosquitoes at bay in some spots, health officials say. But the breeding conditions were good, and the unseasonable heat of late brought the bloodsuckers out in spades.

An explosion of mosquitoes prompted health officials to conduct aerial spraying of the 7,700-acre Cicero Swamp outside Syracuse for the first time since 1996.

Mosquitoes spread West Nile virus, which first appeared in New York in 1999 and has since expanded westward, killing more than 560 people. This summer, however, they're also found to be carriers of Eastern equine encephalitis, a brain-swelling disease that killed two people in Massachusetts in August.

Late-spring deluges delayed plantings of cabbage, cucumbers and other vegetables, and flooding in low-lying fields will help lighten yields of corn, wheat, hay and other crops, said John Lincoln, president of the New York Farm Bureau. The wet weather also brought a higher incidence of blight and other diseases in tomatoes and potatoes, he said.

"Certainly, you need to have moisture to grow a crop," Lincoln said. "One of the biggest problems we had this year was the total amount of rain but also the fact that when it came, it came so fast and so hard that the ground didn't have a chance to take moisture in."

The Northeast got an average sprinkling of 6 inches of rain in July, almost 2 inches more than usual, making it the third wettest July in the Northeast and the wettest ever in New York and Pennsylvania.

In August, the persistent rain kept attendance figures below 1 million at both the 12-day New York State Fair and at Saratoga Race Course, which ended its six-week run Monday.