Sand, surf and looking for things the waves bring to the shore. If  you’re lucky, you can find a beautiful shell, shark’s teeth, even sea glass from time to time.

It’s the perfect place for kids to play without having to worry about them getting into the trouble they can usually find.

Sand is soft so falls don’t hurt, and there’s usually very little washing ashore that can be truly dangerous.

A lot of people take a memory jar along, so they can collect the sand and any found objects; then later look back and reminisce about their perfect beach day trip.

But we should never forget that the ocean is a very big place, with lots of very big secrets…some of which can be extremely hazardous.

Case in point: Kelly Gravell, from Burry Port in Wales, went to a local beach with her husband Gareth and their two young children, Erin and Ellis for a picnic.

They didn’t have a memory jar, but they took lots of photos to remember the day by.

Some of them were pictures of the kids with a big bulb-looking thing the kids had found washed up on shore, all of them marveling at the number of barnacles attached to it.

Ellis banged on the object a little to try to loosen a few of the barnacles. They were stuck tightly, though, so the kids moved on to more interesting things.

It isn’t totally unusual to find buoys washed up on shore, and that’s what the parents thought this was. They explained to the kids about how they were helpful to ships out in the water.

This one, they thought, had broken loose and made its way to shore. They had no way to know about the secret that was hidden by all those barnacles.

They took some more photos and then as evening fell they headed for home. As it turns out, they didn’t need those photos to be able to remember the day.

No, they wouldn’t forget it for a very, very long time.

Five days later, Pembrey Country Park officials announced on their Facebook page that their favorite beach had been closed.

As it turned out, that “buoy” was in fact a United States military mine bomb.

It had been floating around out there since World War II, and a family friend who had seen photos on Facebook of their children with the bomb called to tell them what that “buoy” had actually been.

As you might expect, the family was horrified. They immediately realized how very different their lovely family excursion could have turned out.

“The realization that it was a bomb—it was completely shocking for us. We realize now just how lucky we were,” Gravell said.

Once reporters saw the photographs of the kids playing on the beach beside the bomb, it didn’t take long for reporters to contact Gravell for comments.

“My children took their boogie boards down and we were going out to the sea. We saw a large object on the beach, so we thought we’d have a little look.

We get things washed up all the time, so we thought it was a buoy. We never thought for one second it was a bomb,” Gravell told ABC News.

But it was indeed a bomb.  Press and Communications Officer for Carmarthenshire county Council Allison Thomas-David stated in an interview:

“It very much looks like a buoy, which we get on the regular, but around it was gooseneck barnacles.”

“Of course as the barnacles started dropping off, that’s when we could see writings exposed.” At first the writings couldn’t be verified.

Eventually they figured out it was an American bomb that had been bobbing about for 70 years before finally making its way to shore that day.

Once it was identified, it didn’t take long for authorities to get the beach closed down.

Bomb experts were called in to detonate the bomb safely and a huge crowd gathered to watch the detonation from far across the harbor.

The Gravell family was there as well, still in shock at how close they had come that day to disaster.

Gareth tweeted about the detonation later that day saying,:

‘So the buoy my kids were jumping on all weekend turns out to be a WWII bomb. Oops.‘

As for the original photographs that made the Gravell family instant celebrities in their small town?

We call them true “photo bombs!”

Sources: ABC News, NTDtv

The post Kids Play With Strange Object At The Beach – Then Shocked Parents Find Out It’s Not A ‘Buoy’ appeared first on Addicting Stories.