Weather Blanket Covers Up Summer Fun at the Beach : Recreation: Overcast skies mean there’s more shivering than sweating along the ocean. Lifeguards say the crowds are a third of last year’s turnout.

Even the sea gulls seemed to huddle against the brisk winds and gray skies at Santa Monica Beach on Saturday morning.

Here it was August already, and the sun only begrudgingly made an appearance--and well past noon, at that. Southern California’s summer, in the words of one lifeguard, has not been kind to beach-goers.

“You looking for the big crowds?” Lt. Nick Steers asked, pausing during his patrol of the sands. “So are we!”

It was, as Steers put it, ground-hugging weather. Better to stay hunkered down on your beach blanket, covered up and sheltered from the wind, than to venture into the cool water, he said.

That seemed to be what most people were doing Saturday morning. Sure, a few hearty souls frolicked in the 64-degree water (about five degrees colder than normal, Steers said); but they were in the minority. For a mid-summer weekend, the beach was relatively deserted and spaces in beach parking lots were plentiful. Lifeguards estimated that attendance is down to a third what it was last year.

“It’s really weird,” Joy Katzenstein, 37, of San Fernando said, looking up from the novel she was reading. “This is June weather, more than anything else.”

Before the sun finally emerged at about 1 p.m., the overcast sky was a deep blue-gray, and fog shrouded the not-so-distant Malibu peninsula. It was a day more for shivering than for sweating, more for blankets than for bikinis. Meteorologists blame the cooler than usual coastal temperatures on a trough of damp, low-pressure air that allows mist and clouds to form and block the sun.

But this is Southern California, after all. Tourists come here just for the beaches, in some cases, and for them, the weather was not about to be a deterrent.

Three businessmen from China, dressed in matching gray suits and ties, rolled up their pant legs and waded through the surf. Briefcases and cameras in hand, they struck poses and took pictures of each other.

“Not cold!” one of the men said.

Elizabeth Cardon, a mother of six from Phoenix, could not have disagreed more.

“It’s freezing!” she exclaimed. “My children are mad at me because I wouldn’t let them wear their bathing suits.”

Instead, her kids peeled off their shoes and, like the Chinese men, were making brief forays into the fast-retreating waves. Except for 3-year-old Scott Cardon. It was his first time ever at a beach, and he was managing to get himself drenched in minutes.

The beach Saturday morning was not the exclusive domain of tourists. Rick Gillichbauer, 27, of Chatsworth and David Groom, 29, of Burbank were among the daring who were swimming in the chilly ocean.

“I was a little disappointed at first because it was overcast, but it’s starting to clear up,” said Groom, who had his 5-year-old son in tow.

Concha Larranaga of Cudahy was also there, watching her husband and four kids. Dad had been promising the children for weeks that this Saturday he would take them to the beach, so, rain or shine, the promise had to be kept.

“Well, maybe if it had been raining, we wouldn’t have come,” she said. “But the kids would have been upset.”

Even with the afternoon sunshine, the temperature at Santa Monica remained in the low 70s. During July, high daily temperatures at Los Angeles International Airport were averaging 72 degrees, 12 degrees below normal.

But the news for beach-goers may be improving. Forecasters are predicting more sunshine and warmer temperatures will return by the end of this week.