Crow-T-Robot

Well, anything that can swim to the cache is going to get attacked by the myriad of lake monsters that Minnesota has...or they'll be picked up by a party boat filled with football players, not sure which is worse. Bruce

I'm not a numbers cacher but if I end up in a park that has 10 caches in it, I want to hit them all before the day is out. It doesn't seem like a big number, but a 30' difference in coordinates can add a significant amount of time to any hunt and it increases the frustration level accordingly. There's only so many times that I'm willing to get scratched by thorns or blackberry brush, to have a branch reach out and snag my shirt or grab the hat off my head or to get the dreaded face whip from a branch that slips out of my hand before I give up on the hunt. Not to mention the sweat, mosquitoes, mud, bugs and pine sap. All those things, I'm willing to put up with for a well-hidden cache, but not so much just because the coordinates are off. Bruce

No catch. Amazon is great for bargain hunting and that is a pretty good price for the unit. Bruce

If your particular Nuvi unit has the capability to access the satellite coordinates, that can get you as close as a handheld GPS to a cache location. If not and you have to rely on the arrow and the unit telling you how close you are getting in terms of feet, I've found the accuracy to be spotty at best. The worst example I have is when the unit was telling me I was 3 feet from a cache, when the actual location was across a road, a pond and a stand of trees...about 100 yards from where I was standing. When I learned how to access the coordinates, I found the spot very quickly. As for the paperless program that pilotsnipes has set up for the Nuvi, it's a godsend. If you want to get out with very little planning, just run a new PQ, upload it to your Nuvi, get in the car and wait for the dings to start caching. I have the alert set to the default of 1500 feet (at 3000 feet, driving down some city streets would cause the thing to go bonkers with alerts). The one minor addition I would like to see is the stats for how many times a particular cache has been found/DNF'd/Notes, etc, that you get on the web page. That's mainly for when I want to drop a TB...I can scroll through the caches until I find one that: 1) gets a good number of finds (not a TB prison, in other words) & 2) alot of DNF's can mean that the cache is in a muggle prone location and might not be the best place to drop a bug. So, something that meets those two requirements would be a good cache to drop a travel bug and/or to pick up a new one. All in all, my Nuvi and handheld work in tandem...but if the Nuvi was more durable (I've dropped it enough to convince myself to get a handheld) and weatherproof, I'd only use the Nuvi. Bruce

I love to cache after dark, but I've slowly learned to leave the micro caches that might be hanging in a tree (especially pine trees) for a time when I can look for them in the daytime. Signal bounce and shadows make a 1 star difficulty micro into a frustrating, and usually fruitless, search. Bruce

I found a TB in a cache and when I searched the tracking number, it showed the TB to be in a different cache since 4/14/07. I found the TB on 8/24/08. I looked through the logs of each cache but that didn't yield anything in the way of someone finding or dropping this TB, but I know that it can take awhile for people to log their finds/retrievals. So, I'm going to give this another week before I do anything. My question is on the actual procedure of how to move the TB from the cache it's showing in now, to the one I found it in and then into my inventory so that I can place it in a new cache. There is an option to "grab it from somewhere else"...will this allow me to grab it from the cache it's showing in and then when I log my find and drop it into the cache I found it in, do I just use that same option to "grab it from somewhere else" to bring it into my inventory? Seems like that would be the right way to go about it, but I wanted to get some affirmation from those who have more experience at moving trackables than I do before I head off into the great dark void of the unknown. Thanks for the help, Bruce

It's the same story with me. I occasionally will open a puzzle cache page and 9 times out of 10, it just looks like gibberish. Or it's based off of Sudoku, which numbs me from the brain down. I know that I can stare at that page for half an hour and end up right where I started...not having a darn clue what any of it means and no real hope of solving it. I'm not one to hold a grudge against puzzle caches and I hope they thrive. There are plenty of people who do them and they get to enjoy another aspect of geocaching that I don't. That being said, there are enough traditionals near me that I don't feel inclined to learn how to decrypt most puzzle caches. If I had a modicum of understanding about encryption, binary codes, morris code, sudoku, etc...I would give them a shot but I'd rather just avoid the frustration and be out there caching on the weekend. Bruce

My experience with the Nuvi is that if you cannot access the longitude/latitude realtime coordinates, (either via the satellite screen or on my unit (the 360), there is a button for "My Current Location", which gives your long/lat as you walk) you definitely should get a handheld GPS unit. I've found the "checkered flag" screen on my Nuvi to be very inaccurate and it bounces all over the place. I've had instances of when the unit was telling me I was 4 feet from a cache and when I called up the satellite screen, it was off by almost 100 yards. Or if I walked to a spot once and it told me I was five feet away, I'd return to that spot from a different angle and it would tell me I was 30-40 feet away. Very frustrating. Still, while I'm a fan of the Nuvi, I will be purchasing a handheld GPS for the durability and ergonomic factors. I've dropped my unit a few times and I'm not sure how much it will take and I'm a big fan of wrist straps. Add in that it doesn't float (well, not that I know of) and probably doesn't like getting wet in general and I love to go out night caching, when things are damp...it just makes sense. Bruce

So, there is a limit as to how many caches any particular owner can get published within a set distance, even if they meet the guidelines set by Groundspeak? I'm sure a note from the reviewer saying the owner had reached his personal saturation point for this area would've been better than silence or non-action. Bruce

Same here. At the moment, I have only 53 finds and I don't think I've ever used just a TFTC in the log. I usually tag it on at the end of my post. Most of my posts are of the one or two sentence variety but I know there are a few that are of the "quick find TFTC" type as well. Before reading this thread, I didn't realize that might be taken as an insult by the owner. That's not to say every cache is memorable but remembering the effort someone made to place that cache is worth at least a sentence or two. Bruce

Sums up my philosophy perfectly. I'm happy enough just for the activity and to log a find. Bruce

What model do you have? I have the Nuvi 360 and if I select "Where to?", then "My Locations" and then "My Current Location", it will give me a read out of my current coordinates. Bruce

Check out Amazon.com for a Garmin Nuvi 360. Touch-screen, pre-loaded maps and you can access the satellite screen so that you can follow the coordinates to the cache. Price: $230. Bruce