Lost Celphone in Sand .. Balboa Penensula, CA. .. Found

Mark and his family are vacationing here in Newport Beach from Northern California. They rented a four person bicycle surrey that they peddled down the boardwalk to an isolated area of the beach.
His son was showing how he could jump off the 5 foot embankment and after a few minutes realized he had lost his iPhone. The family went to the local merchant buying a couple plastic shovels. After two hours the Celphone was not to be found.
They returned to their hotel where Mark searched the internet finding my contact information on TheRingFinders.com. When he called me, I was excited because this sounded like an easy search. I checked the tides which were still low enough to attempt a search before salt water might damage the Celphone.
I was at the location within 30 minutes. It was about 8:15 when I spotted the plastic shovel that Mark had left in the sand. I got two large signals that could have been the phone. The third signal was the Celphone more than 14 inches in the sand. It’s not wise to use a sand scoop to retrieve phones, digging with my hands it still was hard to find after having heard a good metallic signal from my detector.
Mark and his family were staying 3 miles from where I live. It was no big deal to take the phone to them. Mark had the phone in his hands less that two hours after he contacted me.