Wreck Diver

I would strongly urge the reader to disregard this particular advice for a number of reasons. Proximal possession by one, particularly in a motor vehicle, is sufficient evidence to charge EVERYONE in the motor vehicle with possession of narcotics, so involving a friend with misguided aspirations that they would serve as a witness is of value only if you wish to share the possession charges and terminate that friendship. Given the shortage of public safety officers, another general rule of thumb is that resources are not wasted on anonymous tips. Without a name, address, and contact number for the reporting party the anonymous tip has zero credibility and evidence gathered under such circumstance becomes extremely questionable under U.S. Supreme Court case law. If you have further questions pertaining to law enforcement interdiction or interaction, please contact your local police department or the regional State Police barracks.

I thought I was seeing things when I saw a whole slew of zero mile Jeeps logged into the last local geo-meet. I moved 20+ WJTBs to another state in less than three days after receiving them... there's no excuse for zero mile Jeeps to JUST be entering circulation two months later.

If you observe narcotics in the field, there are a couple of things that I would suggest, and a couple of things that I would discourage. Primarily, evaluate your own safety. If you found a small stash that may look as if it had been discarded or accidentally dropped, you may have time to linger. If it appears to be an ownerless stash and your safety isn't compromised and there is little danger of anyone else accidentally finding it, then mark the stash as a waypoint and photograph the narcotics if you have a digital camera. Having other items in the photograph for reference or scale will be valuable to responding officers. If you wandered into a crop, you should quickly and carefully leave the area while watching everything around you. When you encounter "commercial" growers, you're likely to also find improvised warning devices such as rat traps loaded with shotgun shells or fish hooks hanging at head level. Walking into a crop is like walking into a combat zone... get out of there carefully and don't touch anything. Under no circumstances should you ever touch the narcotics. Many narcotics are absorbable through the skin and handling them may introduce the narcotics into your body. This has been a huge issue with police unions because careless handling of narcotics has led to accidental absorbtion and positive drug tests that jeopardized (or cost) the officer their job. Handling it also contaminates the evidence, as we can often retrieve prints off of plasticene baggies. If you need any further discouragement of the hazard, I will forward the story of a police officer that assisted in a raid of a meth lab and then wore the same combat boots home at the end of the day. The residue on the boots that he tracked across his living room carpet overdosed and killed his two year old son. If there's a chance someone else may accidentally wander onto the stash and you have a cell phone, you may elect to stay with it and call the local or state police. The primary concern is your own safety.

I would like to see this implemented as well, though I would have concerns that a user edit to include multiple image files would generate multiple e-mails notifying the owner of cache page edits. This would probably be a problem for the geocaching.com servers, and for the end user with dial-up or who are paying for data received. Could it be implemented with a statute of limitations similiar to new forum replies? "There may be more cache log edits, but only 1 email is sent per Geocaching.com login to limit the amount of mail that is sent to your inbox."

This may end up being the first cache with an "Epileptic Warning" attribute...

Great idea, and nice implementation. (I had four pieces left and got the "oooops" message.)

Submarines and shipwrecks are a common theme in my caches, if you ask my opinion. But, a more recent observation seems to be that outside of the caches I adopted, all my caches seem to have involved massive loss of life. (No cachers that I didn't want harmed have been harmed while hunting my harmless caches.)

I have a lot of experience diving deep shipwrecks around New England, and quite often these wrecks share their violent end with unfortunate members of their crew. In some cases, these wrecks still contain the remains of the crew and I can assure you, it is a surreal experience to be 130 feet deep and 50 feet into a wreck and gingerly swimming over skulls and femurs every few feet. A portion of this particular wreck had been removed in the 1950s and though the salvaged items were a centerpiece for quite some time, they were eventually relocated to a field that has since overgrown. It took quite some time to relocate these salvaged items, and it was finding them forgotten in an overgrown field that prompted the idea for the mystery cache. So, I had the rough idea in my head and I needed some image files to assist with the storyline. I was very surprised to find that "JudgeCrater" had a cache in California that was not only of a similar topic, but it had some exceptional image files that I could use. JudgeCrater seemed to have an interest in German U-boats based upon his letterbox hybrid caches like U-101, so I contacted him directly and let him know that I was developing a mystery cache that was related to a German U-boat, and though I actually had a U-boat to incorporate into the cache, I was lacking in image files that I could tailor to the cache. JudgeCrater was happy to allow use of the image files, and as such, I incorporated his name and a less directly related cache into the Mercury Rising mystery cache long description. Since then, I've developed two other mystery caches involving a United States Balao Class submarine, and a Soviet Juliett Class guided nuclear missle submarine. Had I developed the first cache without asking for approval from JudgeCrater, I think that he would have been very displeased in the long run had he been searching for German U-boats and found my cache page loaded with images that were modified from his own. The same would hold true if someone helped themselves to my concepts and work and applied them as their own for subsequent caches. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but only when it is a condoned imitation.

I believe the now archived submarine cache mentioned by geoaware is the AE2 mystery cache by Tangles:

I spent several hours over a consecutive four day period trying to locate a series of micro caches in the Dominican Republic last month and though we wasted a tremendous amount of vacation time on the caches and posted some strongly worded DNFs on the cache pages along with corroborotive photographs, we come home from the tropics and find that a cacher logged all of the caches as easy finds. Unfortunately for them (and their credibility) the legitimate FTF posted a photograph of the log book when he signed it. The post-dated FTF must have used invisible ink, and it apparently spilled on the micro caches as well! The micro caches were: Rettungsturm Bushaltestelle (archived after our DNF) Unterstand (archived after our DNF) I would have thought that this was a isolated case, but a week after I get home and post a lengthy log about dropping three travel bugs off at the Punta Cana Christmas Geocache a few miles further up the beach, I get a notification that the cache was (supposedly) found. Like you observed, they never gave any details, and they certainly never made mention of the unusuable condition of the log book. Again, I'll leave the reading of the logs and the drawing of conclusions to the forum members.

"Better to fail with honor than succeed by fraud." - Sophocles Credibility is everything, and I know a few cachers with cachelust in this area whose finds were later demonstrated to have been completely engineered. The funny thing is once you start pulling at one loose thread, it's amazing how much of their comfortable and highly padded "Found It" blanket suddenly unravels!

If you head to the Blue Hole, stop by the Willya Lookit the Caboose on THAT One! virtual cache as well. It isn't weird per se, but it is worth stopping by.

I think I found out what's been happening to all of the Yellow Jeep Travel Bugs when I was on the way out to archive the Trail Mix traditional cache in Dartmouth, Massachusetts: On a more serious note, I would offer that EVERYTHING about the The Blue Hole-Search for the Jersey Devil traditional cache in Hammonton, New Jersey was weird and some of the pictures of the trip to the Blue Hole were disturbing. I won't put the pictures here without warning.

This might also prove a beneficial nudge to correct some of the many caches in southeastern Massachusetts that have been disabled for several months without action by the owners. No one wants to post a Should Be Archived on disabled or poorly maintained caches, but if they have been disabled for a prolonged period and the owner continues to cache without correcting his own cache issues, an intermediary formal suggestion to enable or archive should prompt an owner response before generating administrative action. Good suggestion Reffek, and thanks Jeremy.

A few of the listed caches, like Scuba Dooba Doo, are caches placed near popular dive sites but they aren't in the water. The SCUBA School I traditional cache in Hyannis, Massachusetts was set up by a dive instructor, but the SCUBA School I cache is a traditional woodland hide for non-divers. The SCUBA School II traditional cache by the same dive instructor is a true underwater cache and hidden aboard a thirty foot cabin cruiser in thirty feet of water.

I believe the now archived submarine cache mentioned by ladycacher is the AE2 mystery cache by Tangles: I've also been rumoured to hide caches aboard submarines, but you'll have to check out Mercury Rising, Still On Patrol, and Juliett 484 to find out if there's any veracity to these tall tales! Glad to see other firefighter divers onboard, Fish Food!

I was never to too comfortable with putting stickers on my vehicle and given the volume of technical rescue equipment I generally carry, I didn't want to risk attracting unscrupulous attention by plastering the car with geocaching or diving decals. The only way that you would know that I'm a diver is potentially the license plate: The only way that you would know that the car is an emergency vehicle is when I hit the headlights, taillights, and strobes. The only potentially recognizable decals I have on my car are Blue Line Identifiers on either side, and the front license plate. I'd just as soon not advertise the contents of the car, as I'd be livid if someone saw a geocaching.com decal and decided to smash-and-grab presuming there's a GPS onboard. I've got way too many pending puzzle cache waypoints stored in the GPS to risk that kind of loss!

Did any of these finds get logged as event caches?

"There are twenty six letters in the alphabet"

This is the view from A Swell Mourning virtual cache in Plymouth, Massachusetts: (Photo by capybaron) This is the view from near the Teddy Bear Trek traditional cache in Sandwich, Massachusetts: (Photo by Wreck Diver)

I had recently made mention that a cacher that created a travel bug hotel a few miles up the road from our travel bug hotel and though he had previously found our cache, he returned and removed all of the travel bugs without trade and then relocated all of the travel bugs to his own travel bug hotel up the street. The tenor in that thread seemed to be that taking travel bugs without trade (of any kind) is perfectly acceptable. There were cachers bragging about taking three or four travel bugs without trade and leaving an empty cache container in the woods for the next finder. The tenor in this thread, less than a week later, seems to suggest that it is tacky by a landslide.

A lot of registered and paroled sex offenders in Massachusetts are familiar with GPS. Of course, the logs claiming a DNF because they couldn't read the GPS ankle monitor have been few and far between...

I think it would be a good idea and it is something that I would like to see implemented. Just because a cache is archived doesn't mean that it was ever found, or more importantly, ever removed from the area. A prime example is this local cache that was listed on August 22, 2003, archived without find on August 29, 2003 and the well-stocked cache container remained in the field until July 11, 2005 when a cacher that remembered the listing decided to go see if the container was ever removed. For two years, the "litter" bearing the geocaching.com label has been lying forgotten in the woods because it was archived without retrieval. The same cache owner also placed this cache on August 26, 2003 and the cache was archived without find on August 29, 2003. This cache also appears to have been archived without retrieval, so anyone care to wager whether there's more "litter" bearing the geocaching.com label at the coordinates?

Good work, John & Shirley. I've searched for a few benchmark disks on the west side of the Cape Cod Canal, only to find that the NGS reporters seemed confused which way was north. I've found some of the benchmark disks were listed on the WRONG side of the Cape Cod Canal, and the listed coordinates were more than a half mile off. At least the benchmark descriptions were accurate. (By the way, I believe that was a one-in-the-same sponsor, so I wanted to say thank you.)

Bushwhacked Glenn, the Brew Bird Cache at Rocky Ridge cache was correctly classified. The cache coordinates were accurate, but the cache itself was disguised as an item that might be found in many yards, and it required mechanical puzzle-solving in order to retrieve the cache container from the hide. I think previous finder's would agree that it was correctly listed, but you'll have to entrust that without explanatory details or photgraphs that would compromise the cache.