Lag Pins

SWFL has been great not only with caches, but with community involvement. The area has gone from cachers just going out and finding caches to a group that has become more of a family. We watch over each other and help out whenever needed and also police our own area when needed (caches needing archived, keeping areas cleaned and maintenanced). Our group went on a road trip completing and being FTF on the I-95 challenge last week and came across some great areas for caching (Blacksburg, VA being top notch) and areas where we had to skip close to 75 caches that were sitting active with multiple DNF's and no owner maintenance after the DNF's. We learned a lot about how other areas are as compaired to ours from that trip and know we have a great area.

Ours are miniature bowling pins with Lag Pins written on them. For our bowling events down here (the Pick Up the 7-10 events), we drill a hole into the head of the pin, label them with the event name and turn them into key chains for each cachers who attends.

The terrain portion was easily 5 star with it being out on the air boat to get to portions. With being there for the CITO and the difficulty of actually removing a lot of the items (old pots and pans being pulled out of the swamp water with tools by two people at one time, items near gator nests, getting people to brave doing these things near the gators), I would rate the difficulty as a 5 star. I believe that any cache that requires tools increases the difficulty. At an event like this, the trash is the cache, and it required tools to get to a lot of items that were submerged or in areas that should not be reached into due to the dangers in the area. With all of that being said, ratings will always be debated. It was a great event, on real short notice, that helped an area that really needed it. The stars really didn't matter, it was all about helping a beautiful lake get back to what it should look like..........that and holding baby gators.

Our group is known for our signature item that we leave in caches (small bowling pins which are signed Lag Pins), so for our hosted event (which is now an on going event) we decided to make the bowling pins into key chains for all people who came to the event. We will do this for each event we host, with the event name written on them. The community around here loved them, so don't rule out any signature swag that you can alter for the event.

www.myspace.com/gomer No geocaching blogs on there, but tons of pictures of our group caching around Florida.