craftypants

Sadly my bank levy £1.50 on foreign transactions on my debit card, which is a hefty percentage on a $30 transaction. Also....not everyone uses credit cards.

especially when a traveller has a very esoteric quest and you cannot help it on it's way, whilst you can't help the bug at least you can let the owner know all is well.

5 caches in total. HOWEVER Sunday morning 6:10am we got our first FTF (despite some confusion) and then today another 4 with some major hillyness involved. Weather was good for us though.

Last sunday I requested my Finds PQ and when it came through it didn't contain all 87 of my finds and when I FindsStatsGen3.0'd it it showed my best month (last may) as 18 finds rather than 21 which caught my attention. Most annoyingly I could not order another till later today (after my caching trip) so I will hope for better luck today.

About 11/12 miles here West of Huddersfield, West Yorks

I am a slight hound, perhaps a hound in training as I do not yet have any FTF's. I am not sure that you even have to have 1 FTF to be a hound though, it is a state of mind (watching your inbox for notifications within your sphere of willingness, gear to the ready, fuel in the tank, civil twilight times for your latitude). Just because more doggedly determined cachers always seem to beat you to it doesn't make you less of a hound, just a less successful one. EDITED TO ADD MY FIRFT FTF AT 6:10AM THIS MORNING

My Garmin GPS60 is called Big G. Firstly because it is a Garmin and secondly for my grandfather who when we were young(er) he would take us walking, 'adventuring' and 'jungleing' he would call it which I believe could also be termed bushwacking. Seemed appropriate. Kim (The Real Big G is still around so it isn't a posthumour honour. I shall have to tell him when I next see him.) PS, I also named my KitchenAid Artisan 'Whippy the Wonder Mixer' which must be sung to the tune of Weird Al's 'Harvey the Wonder Hamster'.

The fastest and easiest quilling tool to make just uses a sewing needle with a long large eye (a cross stitch needle is great here). Stick the pointy (cross stitch needle not so pointy) end into a piece of dowel to make a handle and then use the snippy part of pliers or a dremel to take the top of the eye off leaving you with a fork. Secure the needle into the handle with glue. To use place the end of the log into the split and roll the handle around, this will give you a nice tight log to stick back in the cache. Alternatively plastic quilling tools are 20p at my local craft place.

Perhaps a good quality scan of each side of the coin could be decoupaged onto a wooden disk, making a slightly more coin-like proxy. For those who say that this would not be a REAL trackable.....if it has a tracking number on it which is registered then it can be tracked. If I scribbled a new TB code on the back of a used envelope and released it, it WOULD be trackable. I know what you say about the weight of a coin....all shiny and pretty but many people just don't have the cash to be putting out fancy new coins all the time, even more so the people whose proxy is replacing one which had already been pilfered.

Thank you keystone. It would be a good feature for reviewers though don't you think???

didn't actually want to bother them till I get the caches nearer to ready and pick out the exact locations. I am thinking it must be possible as events often have specially released caches and I am sure reviewers don't want to have to make appointments to be at their maching to publish the caches.

I am looking to place the first 5/6 caches in a series along a stretch of scenic canal near my home. We have several FTF hounds in the area and this 5/6 caches over about 3/4 miles of canal could very easily be FTF'd by one person in a couple of hours if they wanted to. Wanting to mix things up a bit I thought if I got all the caches in place and ok'd by the reviewer is there any way for the local reviewer (Deciangi) to schedule the caches to release at specific times without him/her having to be at their computer to press the button (I know they actually have a life). I was thinking posting one per day but at different times of the day (2am, 8am, 3pm, 7pm, midnight) or something like that to try and get different people to FTF each one. I realise that if someone wanted to they could still FTF every single one but at least I would have made it hard for them. Also by publishing them is fairly rapid succession they will all be out in less than a week and the people who aren't looking for FTF will probably not go till they are all out and can do them all in one nice walk, I would be irritated if I went somewhere for a new cache and then got a notification the next day that another cache half a mile away had just been released and I had to go back. I had a fantastic day of cacheing near my mums house on sunday and found some AMAZING caches and want to put what I have learnt into practice. My 5 or 6 caches will be a mix of evil camo nanos and easier smalls and regs to keep people on their toes. Thanks, Kim

We are still fairly new cachers, over a year but only 65 finds so far. I am really looking forward to the happy occasion where a cache...near our house....released in the last hour....and we can go straight out ....and we get our first FTF!. But if someone handed it to us on a plate then I wouldn't have the joy of snatching it from the clutches of one of our local FTF hounds.

I also had a few which were not coming through since the 10th (ironically the date I payed for my second year of PM after 2 months without). I could force the issue by copying the query which I did use once. However today I did get a scheduled PQ without the workaround YAY!

How about allowing members to specify a day like a normal PQ BUT it will only run IF the member has had activity in the time since it last ran. This would filter out inactive members. ie I could select sunday but if I have not cached this week I would not recieve a new find PQ. Also, if I then cached on the tuesday I would not get a new findsPQ till the following sunday.

I am still a fairly new cacher (over a year but only 61 finds). I don't hesitate to ask for help (or co-ord confirmation where there is no checker). I do however always add into my pleading emails some of the things I have tried or considered to show that I have actually thought about their puzzle rather than just asking without really trying. If I heard nothing from the owner or they seem to have left the game I would consider asking a local pro cacher who had done the cache for some advice.

I think it is important to log DNF's as part of the social contract between cachers and hiders. If you get a DNF on your hide you know to keep an eye on it, more than one and I would suspect muggle activity. Of course this all depends on the difficulty of the cache, one DNF of a 5 star would perhaps make me (If I owned any 5 star caches) send a message to the DNFer to see if they had the spot (without giving it away of course) and maybe give them a little hint for the next time. If they describe the exact spot with no cache then you can suspend your cache and save others the wasted journey. I think it only polite to log DNFs, had a few myself (61 finds, 6 DNF's only 1 of which was missing) mostly when we were a bit greener. Now we don't look at the hint till we have had a hunt around.

Due to the problems obtaining ammo cans in this country, most cache containers are now of the lock and lock variety. I have found them to be easy to obtain and affordable (unlike the rare ammo can). I have just 54 finds with at least 40-45 being lock and locks and never have I found a damp one. One of our most recent ones which had gone unfound for about 8 months in an exposed location had been left all that time with just one of two lock flaps down, still dry. Our first and only hide(which was sadly muggled quite quickly) was of this variety, someone got a free Wilko's LnL but they will have had a hard time getting the laminated cache info out of the lid...it was epoxied into place. Long live Lock and locks....so long as people avoid low quality imitators, good quality imitators are fine by me though.

We did two caches today above Marsden in the Colne Valley, West Yorks. We still have quite a lot of snow on the ground and the going was icy in places and very muddy in others from snow melt. We took a photo across the valley which can be seen here, note that we haven't had any fresh snow in over a week so I dread to think what this would have looked like 2 weeks ago. http://img.geocaching.com/track/log/f0a9dd...09389b57648.jpg

We had planned to cache on the 6th of feb to mark our first "cacheversary" but were stopped by the weather. We had well over a foot here in the Colne Valley and even though we are "lucky" to live on a main road, just getting a saloon car over the 2 foot slush/ice barrier between the parking bay and the clear part of the road was surprisingly difficult. Also the cache we were going to visit was down tracks and such and it seemed like uneeded risk. It had also occured to us that we would leave a trail straight to the cache should we find it. You know how your cache senses start to tingle when you see a good spot...that pile of rocks, a hole beneath a tree etc, how would that work under a foot of snow? So we gave it a miss. But we did use the hiking boots to get to the local co-op intact once we decided we couldn't take the car to Sainsburys without dieing.

Jaz666, we were the last to find the old multi of which you speak despite having only 3/4 part co-ords. The fourth could only really have been 39. We also went back a few hours after your new cache went live but were beaten to FTF. The location was VERY close the the old one and the cache container and contents (exept the log) were also the same. I still don't understand why adoptions we gotten rid of, if the original owner was so bothered about there £2 tupperware box they would have retrieved it before leaving the game. And what about muggling of caches, if their container was so precious then they wouldn't hide it under a rock down a public footpath would they.

I introduced caching to my OH as we like to go out on walks but I often have trouble finding the mitivation to get out of the front door (ill health) though I mostly enjoy it whilst I am out. So for V day 08 I received a Garmin GPS 60 and a premium membership to GC.com. So no, he doesn't think I am sad for geocaching, he wishes we could go more. Just as I dont think he is sad for taking photos of disused industrial stuff whilst I poke through a tupperware box on the moors. Now my guiding he can't get his head around, every week going to help run a unit of 23 (loud) girls and go camping in the rain every summer is beyond him.

Mine is a pic of my best friend when she came to visit recently we took her out for her first five caches. I shall have to annonymise it then post it.

Perhaps individuals with signing issues could print (or pre-write) stickers with their caching name allowing them to leave their mark on the log without signing, obviously not super-tiny nanos though. I have stickers allowing me to leave my rubber stamp image without taking stamp and pad out with me and they have our caching name on and space for a date and come in about 4 sizes for different sized logs. Also useful when you are in a hurry and want to get the log back into its safe place before it gets soaked in the pouring rain.

And if people would just read the instructions before playing the game then they won't get their knickers in a twist, blue or otherwise.