Seven chilling words before tsunami hit: Inside family's escape

Lindsay Asquith? was in Thailand for a family holiday in Phuket when she sent her daughters up to their hotel room to pack, despite their protests.

"They were furious with me," Lindsay tells 9Honey. "They all wanted to go down to the beach and leave mum to pack that morning.

"Now they think I saved their lives," Lindsay says.

It was while they were all packing that Maggie, her eldest at 13, asked, "Mum, is there a river near here?"

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When she told her daughter there wasn't, she responded, "There's a muddy wall of water coming towards us."

Lindsay knew instantly it was a tsunami.?

"I know it sounds really weird, but it was ?slow coming in," she recalls. "What's more scary is when it goes out again, it takes everything with it.

"It's the power of the surge backwards, not the surge forwards."

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They were staying on level two of their hotel, immediately headed to the higher floors and watched as that first wave came in and sucked everything out.

The "first floor was quite badly damaged, and everything in the pool area, the pool bar was ripped out."

Then they looked on in horror as a second wave began moving towards them.

"It wasn't as powerful as the first one," Lindsay explains.

"We were watching as it came in and we could see it as it went out.

"The thing I remember more was that we had three young children, so I grabbed the littlest and my husband grabbed my middle daughter and then Meg said, 'Mum, I'll be fine.' You realise you don't have enough arms or hands.

"She's very strong, but at the same time, you have to make choices."

Hotel staff quickly organised for transportation to higher ground: a country club on the hill. "Nobody knew whether there was going to be more," Lindsay says.?

During it all, she and her ex-husband John, who she says is "great in a crisis," were very calm.

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"He's an engineer so he thinks through things logically," she recalls. "He said we had to get out of there right now, we can't stay here."

They managed to get out and travelled to Kuala Lumpur, where they had booked a shack on a beach on an island. But due to the choppy seas, they got stranded.

"The children wouldn't get out of the shack, none of us wanted to be on the beach to be honest, none of us. So we just came back and said, let's just rethink our holiday and do cities," Lindsay says. ?

They were able to contact their family to let them know they were OK.?

After arriving home, Lindsay says she did experience "a bit of survivors' guilt."?

More than 200,000 people had died in what would become one of the largest natural disasters in recorded history. ?

While they were travelling they didn't watch much of the news and when they returned home they chose not to.

The children returned to school where staff kept a careful eye on them.? The family lived in England, far from the ocean, which was a Godsend.

"My youngest wouldn't watch the news and we had to do a ritual at night to get her to sleep for a while," she says.

"I didn't know how much that was the tsunami because kids go through stages of not being able to sleep, but I think it was all to do with that

"She used to sleep with these lion dolls under her pillow, for every family member, so we were safe."

The family eventually moved to the northern beaches in Sydney. By then her children were happy to visit beaches once more, but Lindsay couldn't bring herself to go too far into the ocean.?

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"It was probably five years after we've been in Australia when my kids said, 'Mum, why don't you ever go out with dad to the ocean?' Because they'd be swimming and I'd go, 'I don't want to get my hair wet,' silly things like that.? And I don't even own a hairdryer.

"When you start lying to your children you realise you've got to tackle this thing."

Lindsay decided to participate in The Big Swim, to raise funds for the cancer charity Can Too. She wasn't the only one in the group who had faced a challenging time they were trying to recover from.

"My youngest wouldn't watch the news and we had to do a ritual at night to get her to sleep for a while."

"There will be other people like me who are fearful for whatever reason," she explained.

Lindsay has since participated in the event four times now and is now a team leader. Her daughter Meghan has also joined her in the event.

Lindsay confesses to experiencing some "scary moments".

"Sometimes the waves can be a bit challenging coming in and going out. My first ever Can Too swim was actually at Palm Beach to Whale Beach and it was really rough and I ended up on the beach twice without even getting out through the waves, but sort of managed to get out," she says.

"I wasn't scared. I was more determined. The fact is people have given you money to do this, so you don't give up."

Now she loves being in the ocean.?

"I'm always aware of how the power of it," she says. "I think once you see the power of it, you can't unsee it. So I would never swim on my own.

Funds raised through Can Too go towards research into the prevention, care and control of cancer. You can donate to Lindsay or enrol for a summer ocean swim program now