PhilatSea

There has been a request to Groundspeak to have these caches banned due to safety reasons. Ground speak has stated that this a a world wide game and thus won't entertain the thought. IN BC 2011 there was a older cacher who stepped over a guardrail and fell to his death. BC Highways has not been too happy with this as guardrails are placed there for safety reasons. I for one just plain hate them. Phil

Let's see we have Adroit Seeker (AS) here that logged over 350+ caches that he didn't find. He swears up and down that he did the cache at 2:00AM and the cache was behind a locked 7 foot high steel fence yet he can't tell you anything about the cache. Then he he has a friend come down and sign one of the logs and has him take a photo of the log and says see I did it. The only problem is there was a photo of the cache log days after he said he did it and he can't be found. Oh and his friend signed AS's name under his.... I would disagree that it doesn't ruin the enjoyment of the game. I was recently in Nevada where he did and ran into many cachers from there who asked me if I was like him logging caches I didn't find. I spent more time trying to deflect questions than talking about caching. There appears to be more and more of this. CO's rarely want to get involved because in this case AS did over a hundred caches from that CO and he doesn't want to fish through the logs to delete them. Phil

Was the current policy rescinded or not? You are aware of many caches in Metro parks including my own awaiting to be published, if it was not rescinded then caches need to be published as per the current policy in place. Caches don't get held up by the reviewer because of something that might happen. (This comes directly from a BC reviewer). Phil

I have found out today after trying to publish some new caches in a Metro Vancouver Park that the current caching policy has been rescinded. It means that no new caches can be placed in a Metro Vancouver Park. Why is this? It was because just about 3 years ago there was a power trail placed in Burnaby Lake Park. The caches were placed at the 161 m and slightly more apart but they saturated the park. I know the first day they were out that several of us ran into the Parks Manager who was very upset of this. Instead of the BCGA stepping in or anyone else for that matter and getting some of the caches archived they remained. You would have to be under a rock in the Vancouver area to not know that Metro Parks was going to soon review the policy. As I understand it the BCGA stood by and did nothing or very little at best. There is likely to be a further meeting on caches in Metro parks now and what happens to them. There was a 3 year rule under the prior policy and those around Burnaby Lake were likely to be archived. The oldest cache in BC is in Spirit Park at UBC. The problem is many parks in BC have similar power trails like this. If other jurisdictions look at Vancouver to their policy this could start a wave of caching in parks being banned. Just adds to the current title of Vancouver a no fun city. Phil

The BC Highways issue has been settled many months ago and published on the BCGA site. Since I am the person that negotiated the policy with BC Highways I know exactly what happened and when. This DID NOT come about because of the cacher from Idaho that fell over the guard rail in the Kootenays. This did come up as a result of some cachers trying to place caches along a highway and were rejected by the reviewer. The caches appealed and lost. The cachers then went to the local highways office and asked for permission and were denied. They then went on a witch hunt and pointed to many caches in the area and the local office took offence and issued a letter (email) to Groundspeak banning caches along highways. Since the letter was from a Official BC Highways Office it was taken to be Official policy. The reviewers had their own interpretation of the ban and implemented it. This would include ALL roads in BC and a cache could be no closer than 50 m from a road. Effectively this would mean that no new caches could be placed in any populated area of BC. I thought the new rule was absurd and contacted my local Member of the Legislature (MLA). I had an answer within 4 days of this and given the name of a Minister of Highways person that would handle the file. Later the BCGA agreed to represent them at the meetings. The Minister's rep was a cacher and this helped a lot. In the end all letters were rescinded and Groundspeak Policy is back in place. Yes there is to be a webpage of what is a highway and we are still working on that. There is to be a common policy between BC Highways and BC Parks. Still working on that. BC Highways would like to see guardrail caches banned. A letter has been sent to Groundspeak but Groundspeak replied they are reluctant to do this because it is a world wide game. Highways doesn't want to get into telling them what they should be doing and just banning such caches but would rather see Groundspeak take a pro-active approach to this. I would agree that a proactive approach would be better. I have been told had the cacher that fell to his death been a child or teenager that went over the guardrail the outcome of the policy would be totally different. This was one reason why Groundspeak was asked to ban guardrails. Hope this helps answer some questions. Phil

I have read the comments since my post above. While I agree it shouldn't affect me it does. When one claims to be a high time cacher such as Adroit Seeker and done so many unique caches and puzzles and is looked up to by those just starting off in caching it poses a problem. He figures since he is the the area puzzle guru he should teach caching 101 courses on puzzles. The problem becomes do you want someone who lies and cheats to teach new cachers that it is okay to do this? Do they say well he is a high time cacher and it is okay for him and no one does anything about it so lets do it. When it becomes too late that it becomes common place then what? When ones says they did a cache and the cache is currently in the CO's hands for repair it is sort of obvious that he could have not done it. How about going on a caching adventure and logging hundreds of caches that your team mates didn't log or do and yet you say it is okay. It just makes a mockery of the rules. So why have any rules?

We have a cacher here in the Vancouver area that was a well respected cacher with 10,000+ find that recently logged some 350+ caches and mega events that he did not do or attend. It was politely brought to his attention and he says it was a GSAK error. He has yet to correct his GSAK error except for a few removals and says why everyone does it. He has logged caches on days he hasn't cached so he can keep his streak going and manipulate his stats for Challenge caches. He wonders why no one wants him to attend caching 101 courses to teach them. Many here in the Vancouver area would love to see this corrected but no one is willing to do it. CO's don't want top deal with it either.

Since this Caribbean Island shows as one country and has done so since the start when in fact for over a year now it is Officially two separate countries with their own Parliament Buildings and Government is a change coming to the way the caches on each side are going to be displayed?

I received an email from Garmin a short time ago that says they fixed the issue with the white screen.

I did this update on Saturday. I had problems where every few minutes the screen would slowly fade away and the unit power off. When connecting to the computer I would not get the USB screen but a white screen. I have gone back to 3.90. I sent a bug report to Garmin and they replied saying the white screen has been seen before. I only got to see/use briefly the new route activity types as my unit kept powering off. Not sure on this at this point.

Appears to have been fixed in the last few minutes as I am suddenly getting them posted almost instantly. Thank You

When you see two Field Notes that are in the wrong order, just click the "Compose Log" links in the correct order. There is no rule saying you have to go top-to-bottom on that page. The whole thing of this this didn't exist before till I did Route 66. I have done ET Highway and didn't have this problem and yes I can use compose in any order I want to correct it. The fact remains it is a bug that wasn't there before and is now. So something has changed and I thought this was the place to report this, I guess I am wrong. Thanks Phil

The time stamps are the same, so it's not possible to determine the order they were found. Do you really care if your milestone is 406-Route 66 vs 407-Route 66 If Garmin can get it in the right order why can't Groundspeak? This may have been a bad example of getting it in the right order but in the case of Planes Trains and Automobiles the puzzle cache was set as a milestone for one of our party and then reversed.

Recently I have noticed that Field Notes are being interpreted differently when they are uploaded from what is on the GPS Geocache Visits Notes (Garmin 62S also confirmed on Garmin 450 and 550). This only happens when you do two caches in the same minute. In this case it is Route 66. Here are the Field notes: GC2K0B9,2012-02-01T01:00Z,Found it,"" GC2K0BB,2012-02-01T01:00Z,Found it,"" When I visit mt field notes page the above field notes are reversed. Here is a snip of how it appears in Field Notes: 406 is GC2K0B9 407 is GC2K0BB In the snip you can see they are reversed. This isn't a big bug but it does matter if you are going for a milestone and caches get switched due to this. Thanks Phil

Well I am glad I read this as I too wondered about this and now reading it, it makes sense. This would be great to add as part of the requirements of an Earthcache when seeking permission and why. I had talked to many others who said it isn't Physical so why do you need permission, I didn't need it when I placed my Earthcache. Phil

I received two emails while I was out and just checked them. The Pocket Query for My Finds is there and downloaded. It appears to be correct. Thanks for looking into this. There are days I wouldn't want to be in your shoes and today would be one of them. Hope this one is now solved. Phil

Yes I did and tried a power refresh and then even tried a browser (IE) that I don't normally use and had to log into the site and still not there. I went and dug out my laptop and tried it on there and nope it doesn't show there either. Phil

Interesting that about 30 minutes after I posted this I get an email saying My Finds Pocket Query has been run (not by me because of course I can only run it once a week) at 5/11/2010 9:14:58 AM* . I go to the downloads tab thinking that someone from Groundspeak has read my problem and run the query again. Well there is still no downlaod for this query under my downloads. What was interesting is I ran two "test" query's to make sure that I fully understood the new system and one came as a "attachment" like the good ole days. Phil

Last night I ran a My Finds Pocket Query and soon after received an email saying ready for download at http://www.geocaching.com/pocket/ where I headed next. I look at my download tab and it says this * Pocket Queries Ready for Download (0) So the question is where did they go? I have searched the forum and I understand I am in the right place for locating my query as in download tab but it isn't there. So what am I missing or is there a problem? I have to wait a week before I can run this again to find out. Phil

I have been away and busy with that little Olympic thing here in Vancouver. This weekend gave me the first chance to see if this problem has been solved. I went and visited both caches in question and there is still nothing I can do to get it to display correctly. PEBKAC. One of them has "The descriptions below are in HTML" checked and the other doesn't. I don't know why I didn't catch that. I have looked and looked at these two pages and compared them till the cows came home and gone back out to the grass lands. Sometimes it takes a clear mind and soemone else to find such stupid mistakes. Thanks Phil

I have been away and busy with that little Olympic thing here in Vancouver. This weekend gave me the first chance to see if this problem has been solved. I went and visited both caches in question and there is still nothing I can do to get it to display correctly. Phil

I have noticed that formatting is still a problem in the aspect that I have two caches GC1H0X9 and GC1H0YB both posted on the same day. If you compare the two pages one has all the formatting for paragraphs etc while the other lacks it. No matter of changing GC1H0X9 will solve this problem. I have tried to copy paste from one to the other and still get one big paragraph. Just interesting that two caches released on the same day can be so different. Thanks Phil

The problem appears to have been solved. I can now download once again. Phil

I am also having the same problem with my eTrex Vista HCX. Latest Plugin installed and tested on the Garmin site. I click send to GPS and nothing but a message saying if I am having problems geting this plugin to run install the latest version of the plugin. Happens both in IE and Firefox. Phil

Well after reading this thread I was reluctant to send my Vista HCX to RAYTECH ELECTRONIQUE in Laval Quebec. My unit has had the "rubber" issue several times and while Garmin has been good to send me the parts I wanted to have them look at it this time because this time it was much worse than prior times and warrenty is up in April. I sent my unit on the afternoon of March 6th from the Vancouver area. I received a email late yesterday afternoon (1617 hr) saying my unit was being returned to me and I should expect it this Thursday. Boy was I surprised at 8:35 this am when Canada Post was at my door with my unit. I opened the box to find a new unit in place of my old one and most of the material on it had been placed back on it. The surprise is this unit is a slightly different unit than my old one and some of the screens are slightly different with different icons. This unit is a Etrex Vista HCx,GPS,AM,TOPO 2008 Bundle while my old one was a eTrex Vista® HCx. The main difference is some of the screens and the icons they use. There is also one nag screen that i am trying to get rid of to at this point. I suspect that Raytech had their knuckles wrapped and service appears to be much better, so does Canada Posts service appear to better..... 17 hours from Laval to Vancouver, not bad..... Phil