I shared the beach with this troupe of extraordinarily cute Chinese kids last week. We were all looking for treasure. I had a few thousand worth of metal detecting stuff, and I found a few corroded old coins. They had buckets and toy shovels and found dinner for the whole family.

At first, there was much squealing and picture taking. Then the boys and dads went way out on the mud flat where I guess the good cockles live. There were a few others out there doing the same thing. It was an exceptionally low tide, and a very silted in bay, so you can walk out a good quarter mile.

The moms stayed on the beach and chatted.

Suddenly, a phone went off with an emergency warning, then another, then another. It was the tsunami warning from the massive earthquake off the Siberian coast.

I already knew about the warning from my tide app, and I wasn’t worried… the wave wouldn’t be here for at least eight hours, and the direction we were facing meant that it couldn’t really get to us anyway.

But when it’s your little one way out there by the edge of the real water, you have a different calculus. All the moms now started to scream and holler to get the family back to safety.

By this time the light was fading and it was getting time for dinner… more on that in the next post.