Upon my morning ritual of coffee and Facebook – I quickly learned that we were under an advisement to stay behind the Tsunami warning lines for our Central Oregon Coastal town.

The day progressed with all of our cell phones beeping with excitement. The boys have some crazy ring tone for theirs, mine announces “Message Received”, and hubby’s chirps. Local and faraway friends sending us messages not to go to the beach.

So we joined the masses by turning on the TV, hunkering down for the day, waiting to discover how the waves would progress as they moved up the coast as a result from the earthquake in Chili.

• Note: I had a friend from Southern Oregon call and say that THIS TIME the local law enforcement was serious. They had been asked to leave the beach, patrols were out in huge numbers to get the citizens up to higher ground.  The expected wave from the pressure of the tsunami was to be between 1 and 3 feet. Which is humorous for us winter weather advisory watchers clambering to the beach to watch the 25-30 foot swells several times during the winter.

We have been studying tides, waves, swells, the pull of the ocean from magnetic, the moon phases, and the sun.  – So today we enjoyed a 6 or so hour long intense listening study from the weather channel, CNN, books on hand – Interesting Impromptu Study!

After it was pretty evident that the coast lines were not going to get hit by a huge surge and wave from the observations of Hawaii and southern coasts of North America – and after the time of the warning – we headed out to the local beach.

• One thing that we were interested in – was to see what type of different debris might wash up.  The reports talked of this “murky water” that was coming ashore due to the strong undercurrent generated by the earthquake moving along the ocean bottom, stirring up mud and debris.  So far – after several walks on the beach, our high tide line debris looks the same as pre-earthquake.

Apparently, we weren’t the only warning breakers, because the beaches had hundreds of people on them at 5:30 (warning was for 2pm).  It was a negative low tide – so there would have to have been a 300 foot plus surge to even hit the  rocks at the edge of the shore line. (Which, by the way, does happen during sneaker waves, even at these low tides, on any normal day.)

It was fun to stop for a photo under the beach closed sign, then join the rest of crazy humanity breaking warnings -  When we walked to the car the banner had been placed in the garbage can, and the boys snagged a few feet of it for a memento. 🙂

 
Only the most extreme low negative tides, maybe once a month, allow one to walk to the area showing hundreds of Sea Stars.