A group of recent high school graduates from Chicopee, Mass. drove more than two hours to enjoy Misquamicut State Beach on Monday.

The Providence Journal Connie Grosch

WESTERLY — “Today it’s really beautiful,” said Carmella Perrone, 60, as she waited for friends to meet her at Misquamicut State Beach on Monday. “A beautiful, gorgeous day.”

She stood at the beach end of a path, scanning the two-thirds full parking lot for her friends.

From a nearby lifeguard chair, Matt LaPlume, 20, said he was surprised to see a line of cars waiting to get in. Perhaps they were buying season passes on the first real weekday of summer in full swing — school was out and so was the sun, finally.

LaPlume and the other lifeguards have been ready for this on weekends since the beginning of May and every day since Memorial Day. They were ready when it rained. They were ready when it hailed. They were ready when the parking lot was full of water instead of cars.

They were ready when each clap of thunder required them to keep the I-don’t-care-if-it’s-raining-this-is-our-beach-vacation people out of the water for another half-hour. And finally, this weekend, LaPlume said, “the good weather showed up.”

“It was really getting depressing,” said Misquamicut beach manager Bonnie L. Mello. “There’s only so much cleaning” she could assign the lifeguards and park staff on a rainy day. “If it’s raining and we’re not charging, they have to go home,” she said Monday about the state’s tightened belt and the summer’s slow start.

Saturday, however, cars started lining up at 6 a.m., Mello said. The line of cars stretched back to the Sandy Shore Motel, she said, and by 1 p.m. on July 4, they closed the gate because the parking lot was full.

Full means all 2,100 of the paved parking spaces and the overflow areas in the grass are taken.

Or, by another measure, Mello said, “Saturday we were blanket to blanket.”

Monday’s crowd was moderate, she said. Between each staked claim of beach was room for two more blanket/umbrella/cooler combinations.

One extended family from Connecticut and New York State had deployed on the beach with a line of shade-sitters under three umbrellas, a line of leg-tanners cooling their feet in a trench, one small person on shovel and bucket patrol in the shallow water and a line of wave-bobbers in the surf.

They all belonged to Art and Gail Karszes of Summers, Conn., who had equipped their 13 children, spouses and grandchildren with sun-protection hats and shirts and bathing suits.

The group is about halfway through a 2½-week beach vacation, and by basing the party in New London and choosing beaches carefully, they said, they’ve managed to find sun every day.

Misquamicut is their favorite because of the waves and the smooth sand. “We’ve been coming here since we were little,” one of the adults said.

Whistles and running drew attention to a swimmer being carried eastward almost faster than the lifeguards could swim. Eric Dumican, 19, reached the troubled swimmer first with the red torpedo float, and off-duty lifeguards Michon Dinwoodie, 17, and Mackenzie Ferreira, 20, helped feed out the line without knocking over bystanders.

When the rescued and rescuers reached dry sand, they all stood equally tall and fit. The “victim” pitched in to help wind the tow line.

“You need to go to acting school, man; nobody believed you,” one rescuer said to Ian LaPlume, 16, a parks worker who hopes to be a lifeguard like his brother. He found out an hour before that he would be playing the victim role.

“This was Eric’s first mock,” said Chris Bitel, 22, explaining that Dumican had run out the “torp.” They discussed what went well and what could have been done better.

Some young men from South Windsor, Conn., rested after lunch on a sand couch they had built in their first hour. Jeff Soong, Vu Nguyen, Garrett Grothe, Troy Wilson and David Han, all 17, had driven from the Hartford area with Jamie Hahn, 16, and Kim Luu, 18, to their favorite beach, Misquamicut.

“We all used to come separately with our families,” Soong said. “It’s the beach to come to.”

“Connecticut beaches aren’t that great,” Grothe added.

The couch consensus: Misquamicut has good waves and good sand.

A sample of license plates in the parking lot testified to the beach’s draw from out-of-staters, who have to pay double what Rhode Islanders pay. Residents get in for $7 per car on weekends and holidays, $6 on weekdays. A season pass is $30 to all state parks, $60 for nonresidents.

Of 50 cars that were parked around noon west of the pavilion, 14 were from Rhode Island, 13 from Massachusetts and 23 from Connecticut.

Monday was a perfect beach day, Mello said. Tuesday might be a different story, with the National Weather Service forcasting a 50 percent chance of thunderstorms after 1 p.m. and 40 percent after 10 a.m. on Wednesday. Thursday calls for clouds and a chance of showers, but Friday is expected to be mostly sunny in the Westerly area.

dnaylor@projo.com