Sun’s Rays an Antidote for Week of Cabin Fever : Weather: But a mild rain is expected to hit the California coast Tuesday morning.

John and Josette Rekettye of Laguna Niguel used the break in a series of storms Sunday to get out of the house and take their two, large golden retrievers for a walk along Dana Point Harbor.

After a week of stormy weather, the partly sunny skies and beautiful views Sunday led thousands of Orange County residents to spend a day outdoors for the first time since the devastating recent storms that put emergency services to a punishing test in Southern California.

“The dogs have been cooped up since the rain started last week,” said John Rekettye as he and his wife rested with their two dogs, Amber and Jenny. “This will be good for them, especially if it rains more this week.”

The weather break Sunday was a mixed bag. Hostile black clouds uncorked light rain showers in parts of the county while warm sunshine broke through the clouds in other parts. Partly sunny skies and slightly higher temperatures were forecast for Orange County today. But another, milder rain shower still loomed in the forecast later in the week.

The recent storms left seven people dead in Southern California. Two Orange County skiers have also been missing since Tuesday when they were reported lost on Mt. Baldy in San Bernardino County.

Sunday, rescue teams called off their ground search for the two men after more than 40 volunteers clad in snowshoes scoured the mountain’s north face without finding any clues.

John McCallum, a spokesman for the Mt. Baldy Fire Department, said that pending any new information, the ground search for Tim Pines, 31, of Dana Point, and Charles Prior, 34, of San Clemente, has been halted indefinitely. Weather permitting, he said helicopters will continue the search today.

In Laguna Niguel, where the sun was shining Sunday, Josette Rekettye said people fled their homes because they were “suffering from cabin fever.” Many expected another day of rain.

“I didn’t expect this sunshine,” said Karen Mellem, 28, who sat on a park bench at Capistrano Beach. “This is a great break.”

She said she thought the worst was over.

Steve Burback of WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times, said the dry weather may only last until Tuesday morning, when a milder storm is expected to hit the California coast. Part of a warmer, tropical system now hovering northeast of Hawaii, this storm will bring some scattered showers, Burback predicted, but nothing to match the deluge of recent days.

“I would not call it a heavy rain,” Burback said. “The worst is now in the past.”

Sunday, small amounts of rain were reported in Newport Beach, Anaheim, Santa Ana, El Toro and San Juan Capistrano with low temperatures in the 40s and highs in the high 50s and low to mid-60s. But in Orange County, the California Highway Patrol did not have the reports of treacherous roadways and accidents that it did during previous days.

But elsewhere, storm and highway crews were still mopping up from the storms.

In San Bernardino County, CHP officials said a mudslide continued to block a 10-mile stretch of California 138 near the Silverwood Lake State Recreation Area.

In Malibu, the California Department of Transportation closed off a section of Topanga Canyon Road near Pacific Coast Highway to blast boulders out of the road.

Engineers with Southern Pacific Railroad, meanwhile, decided that the tracks between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara remain too precarious for train travel. Amtrak officials said that service will not resume before Tuesday and that any more rain could cause further delays.

In Ventura County, 20,000 cubic yards of mud and rock slid onto California 150 early Sunday morning, forming a six-mile barrier that officials said could take more than a week to clean up. Other than the slide, however, Lt. Paul Anderson of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department pronounced much of his jurisdiction “pretty dried out.”

In Orange County, public works boss Bill Reiter, who is responsible for 350 miles of flood channels and storm drains that feed rain water from the mountains to the ocean, used the break Sunday to prepare in case of another storm.

“I’m happy that (Monday) is a holiday so my people can get some rest,” Reiter said. “When Tuesday rolls around we are going to put 100 people out there checking the flood control system. We will concentrate on making sure everything is in order.

“We’re not just going to say its over and forget it,” Reiter said. “We want to be ready for the next storm or storms. We still have a month and a half of winter weather left.”

“I think the flood system did well,” he said. “We had some erosion in the earthen channels and a problem in one of the concrete channels, but otherwise it worked well.”

Reiter said the numbers speak for themselves. None of his flood channels overflowed during heavy rains Thursday and Saturday and only one home in the unincorporated area of the county was damaged by water.

Reiter spent much of last week in the county’s storm center in Anaheim where he directed dozens of employees taking reports from the public and dispatching work crews to head off flooding. Employees maintained running tallies of rainfall throughout the county and lists of where equipment and work crews were being dispatched.

The county had a skeleton crew at the storm center Sunday and a small staff in the field, mopping up from the storms and fixing a critical drainage area at Poche Beach just below the Shorecliff Golf Course in San Clemente.

“It is nice to have a couple of days off to dry out before we get hit again,” said Max Bridges, a supervisor for the county Power Works Division.

As Bridges watched the bulldozer plow open the Poche Beach drainage area, he praised the drainage network for avoiding major flooding.

“It does work well,” he said. “It gets hectic at times, but there is no way of getting around that.”

In Irvine, police reported Sunday that a group of teen-agers were seen rafting in a flood channel and tried to flee police who were calling to them through loudspeakers.

The youngsters’ boat was made out of wood and fiberglass and guided by a large wooden pole. Officers said the teen-agers were arrested on a charge of violating a county code that prohibits rafting in a flood control channel.

Times staff writers Amy Wallace and Tammy Drummond contributed to this story.