WalruZ

what you have is a bison tube. I found one recently. The hider had found a branch about the thickness of your leg which had a hollow in the end. He put it in the hollow and fashioned a wooden 'plug' to keep it in and disguise it. Placement is key, you have to put it somewhere where it won't be gathered up for firewood or play, and where there isn't much else around to search, otherwise it would be too cruel. I have one hidden under a guywire skirt (the plastic thing that protects a guy-wire that stabilizes a phone pole). It's near a really neat OOP. They are actually quite versatile. Start looking at telephone poles...

The short answer to how I've done this in the past is that cement won't stick (much) to plastic grocery bags. wrap a cache container in those, then cover with cement, shaped to taste. When dry, strip out the bags and you have a shell for your container. I recommend some additional spray paint. These do not usually fool geocachers, but they are great for reducing mugglings of caches in problem areas.

A recipe for never hearing from your Geocoin again. People steal them. It's much easier on the psyche to use Geocoins as FTF prizes.

At an event we put on we hid some cammo-taped cheap tupperware containers of gift-bag stuff within a not-too-big proscribed area, and at a certain point we described what was out there to the kids. No coordinates, just boundaries. Each container had one type of thing in it, so they went from one to the other filling a bag (which they could then play with.) It was simple enough that even the younger kids could do it with help from the older ones, no GPS required. It might help if you tell the kids to re-hide the containers as they visit them and then let them go out a few at a time, but the ones who were there were just an uncontrollable whirlwind. Especially those little checkers. whoo!

Most people will not trade for consumables in caches, regardless of how 'untampered with' they may appear. It's not necessarily a rational thing, it's just an 'ick' factor that people have. I used to have a girlfriend who personified this - she would not drink water from the bathroom tap, even though it was the same water that came out of the kitchen tap (which she would drink.)

Agreed. An urban or suburban park is not a good place to hide an ammo can. Normal people who use the park aren't going to look at an old military ammo can and think "oh, no big deal." They're going to think "whoa, the police should see this." Try rubbermaid for these hides - Ammo cans belong well out in the woods, far away from prying eyes.

add logsheets to the micro stuff to make them read-to-hide. Since the cache is fairly large, put in a fully stocked ready-to-hide small, maybe even two.

The most quickly traded-for item you can leave in a cache is a ready-to-hide micro (or small, if the cache is big enough.) All variations on film cans (with magnet, with wire held on by cammo duct tape, etc), key-hider, cammo-wrapped beach safe (much better than film can as they have an o-ring) altoid tins, yadda. Already stocked with stash note and log, people will leave good swag in exchange for these, and the price of creating them is low. Try it and then watch the logs of the caches you've left 'em in. You'll see.

I've found from experience that the one thing that geocachers really want to take or trade for are ready-to-hide caches. They are inexpensive to make and sure to please. Leaving them is a pro-active way of 'trading up', in that it costs little to leave them but they will be swapped with a nicer class of item.

Some of the higher numbers cachers in our area do "waypoint only" searches in order to make things more challenging. They make sure it's a traditional, but other than that all they have is the waypoint in their GPS. They usually have a PDA in the car just in case, but their first attempt is waypoint only. After you've found a few thousand this approach livens things up a bit.

If you leave good logs you don't need a seperate diary. There's a link on your "my" page that will show you all of the logs you've left.

Those nano-caches start life as LED 'jewelry'. There's a magnet on the base and the cap has a very small led light that flashes. The 'compartment' is for the small battery that runs the light. Remove the battery and paint it to match a ferrous structure, add a log made from a thin strip of paper and you have a nano cache. One of the best I've found was embedded in a tree burl which was itself attached to it's host tree via RE magnets. They are a maint. nightmare. The logs fill up quickly - don't place one that's off your own personal beaten path.

Yep

Try buying a good sized rare-earth ring magnet, perhaps this pack and then put them on the end of some poly cord. Then just dangle it into the bush and see what you pick up.

Well... When you post a "found it" log to a cache, you are saying, "I found the cache". If you did not, in fact, find the cache, then you're lying. Granted, there's no lasting material damage done, but lying is still lying, and when you post a lie to a cache page, not only are you lying to the cache owner (as briansnat points out) but you're lying to everyone else you play the game with. Most people don't like being lied to, even if there are no direct consequences.

Since you have multiples, make your own experiment. Use duck (brand!) cammo tape on one, spray paint another, glue dirt on a third. hide them all and see how it goes. I personally prefer the duck brand cammo tape on a PB jar. It adds an extra level of protection, and in most environments that stuff makes a container almost invisible. Spray paint has a tendency to flake off from plastic after it's been out for awhile.

I found 3 or 4 the day of my wedding. The tux was hanging in the car, my best man was in cockpit seat, there was nothing else to do. I didn't log them until sometime the next day though... (insert your own ribald comment here...)

If there are two worthwhile spots for caches that close to each other, perhaps you should have considered a multi. In fact, you could archive the existing cache and construct a multi there instead. I find that a traditional works best if there is a single significant point to place a cache within, say, 2000 feet, and a multi is more appropriate if you want people to 'tour' a specific 'route', since with multis you can exercise more control over where people go and how they proceed.

The ignore button is your friend.

cachemate runs on the palm and shows you the data from the listing page for various caches. A cache page doesn't take up much memory, so you can fit a whole lot of cache pages into what is a very portable device. GSAK can open a zipped pocket query such as you receive in email from running a pocket query. It can then load it to a palm, or a gps, or export it again in any number of formats. you run it on a windows box. it's basically the intermediary between the pocket query output and your palm / gps. I don't suggest pinching dollars when it comes to buying a a palm. The newer ones are much faster than, say, the M-100 series which are imo painfully slow. if you get something from the tungsten series you can also run mapopolis, which will give you maps of your area (no more lugging around piles of maps / mapbooks) and can show you the caches on the map, much like a mapping gps. I use a geko for my GPS and my tungsten for all my mapping needs.

I am well known in my area for hiding fake rock caches. They don't usually fool geocachers, but they don't attract the attention of muggles and they stay unmuggled much longer. I have one (hidden in conjunction with a local) in downtown San Francisco (poet's peak) in a very high traffic location that has gone unmuggled for years. The main thing to remember is that cement won't usually stick (much) to plastic grocery bags, the cheap ones you bring your groceries home in. What I've found is that if you embed a regular size container in cement, the shell eventually breaks from handling. it's much better to take a regular size container (rubbermaid advised), and swath it with those grocery bags, quite a few of them. Then take straight cement (not mix) and form a shell around the swathed container. Shape as you wish - even just a simple roundish blob is effective for the stated purpose. Let dry, invert, strip out the bags and you have a shell that fits over the container. Spray paint of various flat dark colors helps. While you're at it, take some film cans and wrap some grocery bag remnents around the lip of the capped end. Again, put some cement over that. When dry, you strip out the plastic and take an old screwdriver to what remains, enough to make it so you can take the lid off. Cheaper than a keyholder rock.

I suppose 'most finds' would depend on whether or not you consider a find on your own cache counts as a 'find'. Most people do not.

This gets trotted out often. "Why does it matter?" It matters. And the thing that proves that it matters is that people abuse the numbers. If it didn't matter, than people wouldn't abuse the numbers, yet they do, ergo, it matters. Simple.

I've mostly seen 100, then every number divisible by 1000.

Actually I've been caching with TeamAlamo many times. The 'team' is Lee and his wife (who is a saint, let me assure you.) She has found 5 caches on her own. He has found the rest, some with, many more without her. He is retired and quite... energetic. On any given day, it's not "will I geocache", or even "where will I geocache" - it's "where can I geocache where there is enough density to make it worth the 40+ mile drive." Those somewhere's are not necessarily strings of lampposts. He does 4, 5, 12 mile hikes every few days, and I've gone out with him for a whole day hike to do 2 caches over 4,000 feet of elevation change. I have also seen him beat the bushes, literally, because otherwise he'll have to DNF what he is looking for, and he does DNF caches. Since other local SF-bay cachers compete with him on numbers everyone keeps an eye on him - and each other - and the pressure to sign a logsheet before logging a smiley is very real. I can't speak for the East Coast. oh, and for what it's worth, I've met and cached with many of the numbers leaders and i know that they don't give a frogs patootie about the forums. They're too busy caching...