azhiker2000

Three years ago picked up an Australian Shepherd. I got a female so my bushes wouldn't die. She does tend to herd my young children, but as a single mom, I find this helpful when getting my kids to bed; I just jump up from my chair at 8pm and the dog does the rest. The kids scream with laughter but run to bed! This is the sweetest dog I've ever known. Generally, the females of this breed get to around 45 lbs, but mine is over 70. This makes her safe when hiking off-leash in the Arizona mountains - the coyotes won't have her as a snack, like they would some of the smaller, pfoo-pfoo dogs. She is friendly to hikers, horses, and other dogs, and has developed hiking-etiquette. A great geo-cache dog! Anyway, my two-cents says you should consider the Aussie!

Thanks for the great ideas! I'm going to try what 2OldFarts suggested, and set an object in my backyard and approach it from different directions. I'll see if I can avoide the 180° change of direction by continuously walking, instead of stops and starts.

Thanks, YEAHRIGHT. I hope that getting a few more finds logged will help me to understand my GPS better, and the two of us will learn to work together. Kinda hard at first, though.

Thanks, everyone! I did slow down to almost a standstill when I approached "the site", and when I began to walk again, that's when I got the 180° change. I did have an idea of where the caches were, and it sounds like I should have just put the GPS away and headed in that direction. I love this sport!

Oh, my! I thought I should get within 10 feet of the cache, then I was on my own. 30-40 feet sounds like a real challenge! Thanks for the insight.

Love this site! I found my first cache over the weekend and am totally hooked on geocaching! I thought it would be easy to start with the caches that were closest to me, the micro caches. On two searches yesterday, I had the same problem, however, and hoped someone here could help. I have an eTrex Legend. As I approached the cache, my eTrex said I was heading in the correct direction, and was within 20 feet. However, as I slowly got closer, the eTrex suddenly pointed in the opposite direction and read that I was around 80 feet from the cache. It did this on two different caches. The first cache had some trees around, so I wandered in different directions, trying to get a better fix. The second cache had a building nearby, but wandering around still gave me the same result. Is there something wrong with my eTrex? Me?