Wazat

Now what size is my cache when I hide a film canister inside a 44 Gallon drum... and someone goes and leaves a pen inside the drum along with my original film canister? Does it become a large all of a sudden?

Is 800g of PB equal to a liter? Easy, fill a one liter jug with water then fill the 800g bottle... Maybe your Regular is not small or large... Just wondering. Weight can mean different things as opposed to volume... How heavy would a film canister full of lead be? mmm....

S 27° 43.866 E 28° 49.233 - At some stage I must log the 650+ caches I did in the PT and the ones last weekend and see by how much this will change... I guess it will move my centroid quite significantly...

Ooops sorry.... couldn't help it.... Oh wait that wasn't in Umhlanga, it was in..... er um... LoL

Trust me we were all wearing a bright orange vest with reflective strips and the c ops still stopped and asked what we were up to.... If I had a clipboard I might have beaten them with it... LoL.

Eish... that would be creepy... I hid a cache at General Piet Joubert's grave and there was a box of ashes also placed on his grave, that of one of his descendants it would seem. My very first cache that I searched for I found some porn magazines on the other side of the hide. Obviously some school boy's hide away. But the bad thing for him was that they had been infested by termites and half eaten.... haa haa. Also found a bong inside one of my very first caches i found... At my first hide I found the skull and hooves of a cow... Which over 4 years down the line are still there. At another cache I found a company ID card, bank cards and a key all packed neatly under a few stones.

YAY, but not near the PT as that is going to cause some problems with traffic and most likely get the geocaching community frowned upon... can you imagine a few hundred cachers all doing the PT during the time of the event.... there were only 4 of us doing the PT and the cops were eventually on is due to someone reporting us...

And it came forth from the people of the concept thereof... The PT was solely designed to grant those looking for it, the opportunity to get 400 finds in a day in order to get a Diamond badge, but for that to happen a select group of cachers were roped in to place initially 50 caches each, but then you cannot find your own cache so a more reasonable number of 450 was decided on and that gives everyone of the cachers an opportunity to reach 400. But then more cachers came to the party (Regretting it later) which pushed up the total to over 650... So in the end it is all for a badge... a virtual badge created by some fancy programmer in whatever country... I laugh he ups the requirement for the Diamond achievement to 650 finds in a day... And this will most likely happen as I have seen that requirement levels have changed before (I did badges too)... I am sure no reviewer here wants to have a repeat of publishing so many caches in one day....

YAY - I did it and it is out of my hair... NAY I have to log over 650 finds... YAY I have lots of favorite points to allocate to real deserving caches... NAY I almost have more cache finds away from my home province than there are caches in my home province, if not more... YAY my centroid is gonna take a huge leap out of the Harrismith area where it has spent the last few years, NAY I have too many Micro sized finds... YAY I did 30 odd caches, not on the PT, over the weekend that made me realise that I still enjoy geocaching... and that there are still some worthwhile caches to do in GP, NAY I still have to log them 650 plus caches... YAY I heard someone mention a PT CITO, YAY I have a bronze, silver, gold, tinfoil and brass badge in something related to finding a container... NAY the badges mean diddly squat to anyone other than those that collect them YAY Earthcaches at least offer real badges with real meaning and I proudly own two badges NAY I forgot where I packed them away YAY to my power trail of one cache on top of one mountain, and you don't need 24 hours to do it, although some of you may... But believe me it is gonna require power and lots of it... Nay to having to fill some email boxes, sorry guys....

Right, I have done it... I went out and I looked for the caches in the Power Trail, We did a run of 655 planned searches plus a few unplanned searches too and came out with a few DNFs It was a long and very tiresome process of doing all of them in a 24 hour period with a team of 4. It was to say the least... a far more rushed effort than the 24 hour spree we did in Bloemfontein but thankfully not as painful on the feet. In the end 2 of the team gave up and myself and Gringer1 carried on... initially to make up for the DNF's just to reach 600 but in the end I found some energy and we did the entire PT except for the short dogleg of 6 caches in the Cradle. My view of this was... a lot of containers that have no meaning other than numbers. Granted a few caches did stand out, a few by Timmo1977 and one or two in the PTA region. But the rest really had no point nor purpose other than to make for a generation of numbers. I was surprised at who had hidden some of these and confronting them they really wished they had not placed the caches.. Mail boxes are filling up faster than they can be cleared for the cache owners and I can imagine the frustration of receiving all these emails. Most as meaningless as the caches... Of the caches that stand out on the bad side, one was placed next to a tree but one has to walk through what can only be described as a roadside rubbish dump. And this rubbish has been here much longer than the cache. for the sake of putting one down every 161m surely moving an extra 50 or even 100m further up the road would have been more appropriate... In hindsight I should have just picked up the cache and have it archived... Children cache too and I would hate to see kids rummaging in this muck to find a cache, what untold things lurk in amongst this rubbish. In the end all I can say is that it was only an experience of finding a lot of repetitive and mostly boring micros... It left me empty really... I got a lot of numbers to add to my stats, numbers that will boggle my mind, but they will not remain memorable... I think the best thing to come out of this is the fact that I will have a lot of favorite points to allocate to a real cache somewhere. There are only going to be 3 or 4 on the GPS series that will be in line, but that is still debatable... In a nutshell... a PT with little meaning like this will get a thumbs down from me... been there done that and hey I get a badge to add to the collection... I wonder if that means something? Maybe I can show it to my kids one day... they might be impressed... but i doubt it...

Finally... Tara and John, you can take it away... Well done.

Go beyond geocaching

Thanks to the two cachers who joined on my event... I believe the rest of the caching community missed out on something exceptional. But hey... it was just another event.

Might want to start looking at my listings.... :-) In the FS

Desmond Tutu?

Will leave that one for someone else..

Cincol you are it, I read the book as a kid in school as part of our curriculum, it was up there with my other favorites Lord of the Flies as mentioned above and Hamlet. Big Brother on TV was named from the Big Brother mentioned in the book 1984.

Good guess but no.... Excellent book though. Read that one in school too....

Cool, what famous Novel published in 1949 was originally called "The Last Man in Europe". The novel spurned a very popular television reality show...

Any plans, I see that Madsons is already up for it. Anyone else? I am unfortunately working this weekend (Standby) so I might get called out if need be but otherwise I will be around to meet up. Wayne - this is still on the cards for my dash to 1000. But will probably be a during the week thing for me, I am thinking of the week after next (week starting on 15th). My plan is to leave Durban bright and early, do a few caches on my way to NN, camp over and cache again the next day, hopefully wiping Newcastle clean. Then maybe back to Durban via Utrecht and Vryheid. On the camp over - can you recommend a place? Is Amcordam a good place to camp over for two nights? PT Not a great place at all, I can recommend Chemsford dam though. That gives you the caches up at Love Rock and then Collins pass to go for. Otherwise there is Utrecht for camping... Great spot too.

Great idea Pete, these days I am seeing a lot of newbies down in Durban and it would be a great benifit to the guys down there to learn the easy way to caching. There are Techno Events held frequently up in JHB that I have attended which are great for learning about all the different aspects. There are a lot of things that even old hands at the game can learn from these events. I would suggest you speak to BruceTP in regards to what formats he looks at for each event as he makes each one a different catagory subject. So not just one event covering everything, but a bi-monthly event covering certain areas... Something Similar could then be done in Durban. Covering everything in one go is not going to be an easy feat..... I would suggest concentrate on the Hiding and seeking of caches, logging of finds, movement of travellers and the general ettiqutte first, followed by short intros to Premium Membership and it's benifits, PQ's and GSAK. These can then be covered in more detail in another event. The thing is most times newbies get a taste of caching and unless they know what more is on offer they will cache aimlessly and wonder how the rest of us do it. But with a taste of what is to come, they might pay a bit more interest to it. Sure fire way to get the next event covered... At which stage you do more in depth training on GSAK, PQ's and Mapsource. I wish I had all this available to me when I began... But Premium Membership in a place where there were only 3 caches when I started... didn't make sense. Now I am going to be lost without it.

Any plans, I see that Madsons is already up for it. Anyone else? I am unfortunately working this weekend (Standby) so I might get called out if need be but otherwise I will be around to meet up. I am planning on dropping a few more caches and will see if I can get the other locals interested. I am a little late for organising an event as I was not sure what was going on this weekend, work wise etc.... But I am sure we can have a get together at some stage, swap TB's and discover coins etc... maybe have a braai... who knows. So if anyone else is interested... keep me informed. If anyone is keen on doing the Majuba climb/hike I am sure I could make a plan to join in. Might need to check up on my caches after the snow although they should be OK.

Was Nike not a greek god/godess of victory or something?

Any Stats on how soon the caches are getting maintained?

Did someone say beer?