Wreck Diver

Andy, thanks for the tips. I have added both links. I am always glad to see new and interesting wrecks (I have been on 62 different wrecks now) and if there's a feasible way to add an underwater cache to it, I'm interested. I did have the good fortune of having a geocache on the Juliett 484 (Soviet Ballistic Nuclear Submarine) that sank AFTER the geocache had been aboard for several years. Navy Salvage Divers eventually recovered the ammo box from a depth of sixty feet: Before: Recovered after sixteen months underwater.

Netuseraz, I am a public safety diver / technical diver / underwater geocache owner, and I can give you some quick pointers: 1.) If you put it underwater, the container will be subject to condensation and flooding. 2.) If you put it in salt water, the container will be subject to corrosion, marine growth, and storm surge. 3.) If it is meant to be removed and opened at the surface, cachers may or may not return it to the intended location. 4.) If it is meant to be removed and opened at the surface, cachers or muggle divers will open the container at depth. 5.) If it is affixed underwater at depth, you will receive "successful" finds from non-divers who were on the boat watching the bubbles. I maintain several lists of SCUBA caches and the lists are constantly changing. Underwater geocaches are inherently problematic and will quickly change status from available to needs maintenance to missing and eventually to archived. If you want to see my lists and read through some of the successful and unsucessful underwater cache ideas, the lists are on my profile and here: SCUBA caches Caches requiring SCUBA in the United States: http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.aspx?guid=821648e5-a67a-4092-9adf-965e7785b236 SCUBA caches (archived) Archived caches requiring SCUBA in the United States: http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.aspx?guid=4abd47bb-1b80-410d-9bd4-6dfac1e27693 SCUBA caches (International) Caches requiring SCUBA outside of the United States. http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.aspx?guid=58289500-0b1b-4c85-a705-ef1834015c85 Keep me posted if you do decide to list a new cache or two and I will be happy to add them to the list!

My only interest in activating the travel bug tag is so that it is able to resume its suggested mission. I was actually in Portland, Maine last week so I could have brought it a lot closer to its goal had it been activated. Machawk appears to be a fairly new cacher and it appears to be his first travel bug, so I'm intent on trying to bring him up to speed on how travel bugs work and what he needs to do to get started as a travel bug owner. I personally gave up trying to send my own travel bugs out safely in the world... other than the one I tethered to a shipwreck under forty feet of water.

On January 27, I flew from Boston to Minneapolis to Tokyo to Singapore and though I was on the aircraft for 24 hours, it wasn't long before I started trying to find some caches in Singapore. On February 04, I stopped by the Lee Hsien Loong TB Hotel and retrieved a travel bug tag that wasn't attached to anything, but the original bag was marked as wanting to go to Nova Scotia. I retrieved the travel bug to return to Boston with me. When I returned to the hotel however, I found that the travel bug had not been activated. I was able to return to the cache to review the log and I was able to gather that machawk had dropped the unactivated travel bug on January 17. I have tried e-mailing machawk several times about his unactivated travel bug and its subsequent travels from Singapore to Tokyo to Minneapolis to Washington D.C. to Boston and to Cape Cod, but I have not been able to reach him. He's logging on frequently, so I am assuming the issue is with spam blocker software. He doesn't own any caches, so I cannot contact him via that route either. If anyone knows how to contact him, please let him know I have his travel bug and have been trying to reach him so that he can activate it and I can catch up on all of the logs so that the mileage isn't lost. If I don't manage to contact him, I'm guessing the only other option is to activate the travel bug and re-create all of the traffic and send him an adoption request once I do finally hear something for him. Thanks for your help, or suggestions! Keith M. McDonald "Wreck Diver" wreck_diver@comcast.net

The Field & Sea (TB2TAW0) is my 35 foot long travel bug in 35 feet of fresh water on Cape Cod: Don't be too surprised if you don't see me add a few more in the 100 and 150 foot depth range!

This is the locked ammo container that I created to lay in plain sight in the Doctor's Quarters in Compartment Two of the Juliett 484, the 300 foot long decommissioned Soviet ballistic nuclear submarine that was used for the movie "K-19: The Widowmaker." The cache container was drilled, sanded, welded, painted, and after the contracted graphics studio completed the Cyrillic lettering, the vinyl was applied and foam padding was added to the underside to help prevent marring of the Doctor's medical cabinet where the cache is located.

I'm interested in a pair in gold, and a pair in silver to match my two pairs of the 2006 Edition.

As a professional firefighter and recent graduate to geocoin collecting, I was a little dismayed to miss the opportunity to acquire some of the Fallen Heroes geocoins, particularly where this personal and professional loss also led me to list the 11 September 2001 Memorial virtual cache. If any of the Geocoin and Pin Club administrators or members would be interested in selling one or more of these coins, please contact me.

Just sent an e-mail and PayPal payment for one Gold and one Nickel finish Geocky (geocachers Of Kentucky) 2006 Geocoins. Nice work on the coins!

As an active public safety diver and geocacher, the subject of underwater caches has always invoked a particular interest in me. I've had the good fortune of diving one submerged geocache, and while I have yet to develop one of my own, I have set up a Bookmark List of the known caches requiring SCUBA in the Continental United States. Unfortunately, I found well in advance that a search for cache keywords using SCUBA or a seach for the SCUBA attribute produced a list of hundreds of caches, most of which had absolutely NOTHING to do with diving.

"Seriously, I hid this geocache on the Juliett 484 last week..."

That's a common reaction when cachers first learn of our mystery cache aboard the Juliett 484, the former Soviet Guided Nuclear Missle submarine used in the movie K-19: The Widowmaker. Even the locals seem unaware that the sub has been permanently moored near downtown Providence, Rhode Island. My own experience as a finder involved the cache Sagamore Hill, where I was startled to learn of a World War II anti-aircraft battery, coastal artillery battery, bunkers, trenches, and foxholes less than a mile from a place I had lived for years without knowing of its existance.

I've found caches in the Dominican Republic and in Mexico that were buried under several inches of beach sand, and though the caches continue to exist today, they were listed prior to the below grade restrictions. These caches were both placed in sugar sand. The sugar sand was more concealment than cover, and the caches were both easily located by simply shuffling through the sand at the indicated coordinates.

It makes you wonder if they had a 2006 "Brokeback Mountain" Green Jeep Travel Bug if it would virtually eliminate the Jeep travel bug hoarding, or if it would end up hawked on E-Bay for the equivolent of Bolivia's national debt.

I have several puzzle caches at this point and have used the Vigenere Cipher, the Periodic Table of Elements, the German Enigma, the U.S. Navy SIGABA, and Russian transliteration. There's no limit to the type of puzzles that you could create to suite the cache.

While I originally posted the topic as a request for icons for SCUBA cache types and for Rappelling cache types, the discussion has evolved to also include the relatively rampant abuse of the SCUBA attribute for caches that may not even be proximal to a waterway. I suggested that these cache owners are spending a tremendous amount of time developing and implementing the SCUBA and rappelling caches because of the difficult environments and the safety concerns, so there is a higher degree of cache quality. The contrary point of view was that a cache is a cache, and that the SCUBA attribute is easily searchable by Premium Members via pocket queries, so there is no need for a new cache type to fit the SCUBA or Rappelling realm. I believe that a Premium Member search of the SCUBA attribute currently provides a list of 177 caches. After sorting through the 159 mis-attributed caches, only 18 caches remain in the United States that actually require SCUBA. When the Project A.P.E. publicity stunt was unveiled in 2001, Geocaching.com embraced the concept with creation of a Project A.P.E. cache type icon. This icon was only allotted to nine Project A.P.E. caches in the United States, of which only three remain. I know the volunteer reviewers have enough of a challenge in researching and approving all of the caches in the queue, particularly with the huge influx of low quality micros in chain store parking lots, so I don't expect to have them police each attribute selection a cache owner selects for their initial cache page, let alone trying to monitor the attributes after the cache is approved. I believe that the simple solution would be to create a SCUBA cache type as proposed, and unless the SCUBA cache type is selected by the owner during the cache submission, then the SCUBA attribute would be greyed out and unselectable. Having this coding restriction would also eliminate post-approval attribute selection as well. SCUBA diving is one of the few areas where geocachers can safely and recreationally venture into an atmosphere that is considered IDLH (Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health) without the required safety equipment. This isn't a spontaneous venture, and prior training, proper equipment, and planning are demanded for the undertaking. The development of the SCUBA cache type and the restrictive selection of the SCUBA attribute should be inherent.

I finally got a day off, so I had a chance to post the request in the Geocaching.com Web Site forum to request that SCUBA and rappelling cache type finder/owner icons be developed to recognize the extreme commitments that cache owners are showing in developing these difficult caches, and the finders that ultimately set aside weekends to search for them. http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=133665

A number of exceptional and demanding SCUBA caches exist at this point, to include the 'The Rapture of the Deep' - (Scuba MultiCache) aboard the Bimini Barge in 90 to 100 feet of water in the Bahamas, and Yukon Diving (SCUBA, Underwater) aboard a former Canadian destroyer in 90 feet of water off of San Diego, California. There are also a number of exceptional rappelling caches, to include the traditional cache Cliffside #6, the rappelling multicache Cliffsides and Caverns, and the rappelling event Cliffsides and Grapevines. Under the current cache listing difficulty ratings, caches that require specialized equipment such as SCUBA or rappelling equipment automatically generate a five star rating. The cache owners are spending a tremendous amount of time developing and implementing the SCUBA and rappelling caches because of the difficult environments and the safety concerns, so there is a higher degree of cache quality. The cache finders who seek the underwater or elevated caches are equally as committed, and they are setting aside pre-planned weekends to stockpile the necessary equipment to tackle the extreme challenges presented with each cache type. Given the automatic difficulty ratings and the level of commitment that the cache owners and cache finders are showing for SCUBA and rappelling caches, I would like to suggest that SCUBA and rappelling cache type finder/owner icons be developed to recognize these outer limits.

As an active public safety diver and an active geocacher, it didn't take me long to start searching for "SCUBA" caches, assuming that SCUBA keyword searches or the SCUBA attribute would provide an accurate list. As ClayJar has noted, a search using these techniques produces a massive list of domestic and international caches that may involve SCUBA, snorkling, wading, or they may have nothing whatsoever to do with diving. I may have accumulated added deco time penetrating U-boats and watched Das Boat far more than Dive Princess can tolerate, but I apparently haven't absorbed enough conversational German to be of use in deciding if a SCUBA cache in Frankfurt requires my doubles to get to, or if the owner simply fell into the attribute icon craze. If you're watching some of the renowned SCUBA caches like 'The Rapture of the Deep' - (Scuba MultiCache) or Yukon Diving (SCUBA, Underwater), then you've probably noted that the caches appear on my SCUBA caches bookmark list. All of the caches that appear on my SCUBA caches bookmark list are in the Continental United States or its territories, the cache pages are in English, and unless you're Jacques Mayol or Carlos Coste and have the capabilities and support personnel on standby to freedive, then SCUBA is mandated. That drops the list down to about 10% of the initial search results. As a side note, under the premise that the SCUBA requirement automatically increases the difficulty to 5 under the Groundspeak guidelines, I think that this in itself warrants the creation of an independent cache type, and cache type icon.

I found an unusual shrine two years ago that still defies explanation... particularly where it was found in thirty feet of water during a search and recovery dive. The shrine was constructed of six to ten inch stones piled to mimic the size and shape of an adult's casket. The shrine was adorned with a three foot high concrete statue of a frog wearing a crown. Each of the four corners of the "casket" were adorned with foot long rubber skeletons with their feet weighted down, leaving their skeletal bodies floating upright. The truly bizarre aspect of this unexpected find was that the dive site was strictly sand to a depth of forty feet, and then progressively deeper silt as depth increased to one hundred and ten feet. Rocks of any size are difficult to find in the 211 acre pond, so unless the shrine builders collected all of the pond's rocks in construction of the shrine, they must have had to carry hundreds of pounds of materials in with them.

As Renegade Knight mentioned, searching for the keyword SCUBA will provide quite a few cache listings. Unfortunately, I've found that some of these listings are misleading, as there are a fair number of caches that contain SCUBA in the name, but they were set up on dry land near waterways frequently used by SCUBA divers. As Vinny & Sue Team noted, I set up a public Bookmark list of caches requiring Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus which lists divable geocaches (as opposed to geocaches that are simply underwater.) Where some of my geocaches are related to the divable wrecks of German U-boats, American Balao Class submarines, and Prohibition rum-runners, it's only a matter of time before I list a divable underwater cache. I'll try to keep it under a hundred.

You should contact the cache owner for hints or suggestions related to their cache puzzles. Asking for help solving specific puzzles on the discussion groups is generally unacceptable, for more than one reason. By contacting the cache owner directly, it provides the puzzle developer with feedback about the difficulty cachers are experiencing with the puzzle, and possible cache issues, such as a mistake in encryption. It also decreases the possibility that the public discussion will ruin the puzzle for any other cachers that are attempting to solve the puzzle on their own.

I believe that the Juliett 484 mystery cache aboard the former Soviet Guided Nuclear Missle submarine somewhere in Providence, Rhode Island may meet the "Cool and Extreme" pre-requisite?

If you'd qualify a cache aboard a Soviet Guided Nuclear Missle submarine as exotic, the Juliett 484 mystery cache might be of interest.

The travel bug owner may elect to leave the missing travel bug in the cache as a means of reminding the cacher that they retrieved the travel bug from the cache. The cache owner may also elect to leave the missing travel bug in the cache as a means of reminding the cacher that they retrieved the travel bug from the cache. The travel bug owner and the cache owner may also cumulatively elect to leave the travel bug listed as a permanent and caustic reminder that a travel bug was removed from the cache and a travel bug owner is out there wondering what became of their traveler.