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The humorous phrase fine weather for ducks, and its variants, are used of wet weather.

This phrase occurs, for example, in the following from Junior Free Press, in the Lincolnshire Free Press (Spalding, Lincolnshire, England) of Tuesday 24^th May 1983 [page 13, columns 4 to 6]:

Just the weather for ducks!

The weather has been pretty miserable with rain, rain, rain, and I’m sure most of you are fed up with seeing the big black clouds in the sky every day.

The earliest occurrences that I have found of the phrase fine weather for ducks and variants are as follows, in chronological order:

1-: From Like Master Like Man (London: Printed by C. Robinson for the relief of the Author’s Widow, 1811), a novel by the British author John Palmer (1776-1809) [Vol. 1, chapter 8, page 107]:

“Fine weather for the ducks—heavenly growing showers, and as desireable to the farmers, as a quarrel to a lawyer, candlelight to a decay’d beauty, or the sight of a French fleet to an English sailor.”

2-: From chapter 2 of The Old Curiosity Shop, published in Volume I of Master Humphrey’s Clock (London: Chapman and Hall, 1840), by the English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870) [page 81]:

“Sit down,” repeated his companion.
Mr. Swiveller complied, and looking about him with a propitiatory smile, observed that last week was a fine week for the ducks, and this week was a fine week for the dust; he also observed that while standing by the post at the street corner, he had observed a pig with a straw in his mouth issuing out of the tobacco-shop, from which appearance he augured that another fine week for the ducks was approaching, and that rain would certainly ensue.

3-: From The Coucou ¹ Driver, a translation of Le Cocher de coucou (1840), by the French author Louis Couailhac (1810-1885), published in Pictures of the French: A series of literary and graphic delineations of French character. By Jules Janin, Balzac, Cormenin, and other celebrated French authors (London: Printed for Thomas Tegg, 1841) [page 117]:

Jacques is also a Matthew Laensberg ² of the first order. He prophesies fine weather or foretels ³ a storm a month beforehand. When you see him cleaning the body of his old coach to revive the colours; and bringing out his brush and pot of varnish to touch up the harness, you may be sure that the barometer is fixed at “fair”; but when he looks with indifference on the numberless splashes bedaubing his well-beloved coucou, the horizon is charged with heavy though invisible clouds: this oracle is more to be depended on than that of Calchas ⁴. Jacques is weatherwise on terra firma as an old sailor is at sea. Suppose it is Sunday morning; the sky is clear, and the rays of the sun are bright and warm. The Parisians crowd into the hackney coaches, coucous, cabriolets, and vehicles of all sizes and descriptions. Jacques indulges in a sly smile, for he feels sure that it will rain; and even while hurrying passengers into his machine, he says in a low voice to a comrade standing by, “I say, friend Landry, it will be nice weather for the ducks, this evening!”

¹ Here, the French noun coucou (literally cuckoo) designates a cabriolet running from Paris to the suburbs.
² Matthew Laensberg refers to an almanac published annually from the 17^th century onwards.
³ In the 19^th century, foretel was a variant of foretell.
⁴ In Greek mythology, Calchas was a soothsayer who assisted the Greeks in the Trojan War.

4-: From Leaves from the Diary of an Officer of the Guards (London: Chapman and Hall, 1854), by the British-Army officer John Stepney Cowell-Stepney (1791-1877) [chapter 7, page 169]:

The weather was now cold and rainy; the 28^th would have been a beautiful day for ducks and hackney-coachmen; had either been in the neighbourhood, we certainly should have roasted, beyond a joke, the former interesting absentees, and availed ourselves of the services of the latter in consideration of the want of umbrellas in the army!

5-: From By Rail to Parnassus, published in Household Words. A Weekly Journal. Conducted by Charles Dickens (London, England) of Saturday 16^th June 1855 [Vol. 11, No. 273, page 479, column 2]:

“I wouldn’t mind a word with Robin Hood myself, God bless him! but, as for your poets, I hate them all: they tie their English into knots, and want a mile of it—knots and all—to say ‘fine weather for the ducks,’ as, truly, it is this morning—Ugh!”

6-: From India. North-West Provinces, published in The Morning Herald (London, England) of Friday 31^st August 1855 [page 6, column 4]—reprinted from the Delhi Gazette of Tuesday 10^th July 1855:

Mussoorie, July 5.—Nothing but fog and rain. A deluge last night and this morning. If you have not been blessed with as much you will have it second-hand from this in the Jumna, doubtless swelling it a height that shall reach the walls of the Imperial city. Capital weather for ducks, and we have plenty of them from Rampore—a goodly breed, thriving splendidly. No frogs astir yet to enjoy it too. Some sickness, and our civil surgeon ubiquitous.