The Forester

I take that as a ding, though I don't have a telly. Here's one which Pimply Saul will probably get quite quickly.

Rathlin Island: Puffins

Nursey will be along shortly, to wipe your bottom.

Mebbe he meant de-ratting?

I've enjoyed parties like that in Aberdeen!

Shaving a bear? Now that's a show I'd pay to watch!

Here are a couple of obliques to give a better picture of the structure(s): and one from the other side:

"Documentary"?! It's not a documentary unless Pimply Saul is presenting it. Sans anorak, natch.

A good crit, DonQ. I'll take that one head on. Under my suggested regime, cache-page readers would very easily see that it was a film-pot-in-a-hedge job and would also see what points had been awarded for that particular film-pot-in-a-hedge, made by people who have enjoyed or disenjoyed that particular film-pot-in-a-hedge. Not all film-pot caches are equal. Some are truly brilliant; others are complete shyte. My proposal proposes to differentiate them qualitatively, not quantitively. For all to see.

I'd like to make a serious and practical proposal. I propose that "Found" logs be given an option to rate the cache, qualitatively, on a scale such as 0 to 10 (or 1 to 11, if you work for the BBC). A purely subjective and qualitative vote for the cache, with, of course, an option for abstaining. It would be a trivially simple matter for the the GC.com programmers to create a running total which averages those votes and display the current result on the cache page. I think it would be much more useful than the X/Y Difficulty/Terrain quantification which is currently made only and solely by the one person who is least likely to be able to make an objective assessment.

Take a look at the size of the dolphins!

Staying with the nautical theme, what's the purpose of this structure? How, and why, is it used? Oh yes, to keep the prefects happy, tell us a nearby cache too, but the important bit is the nature and purpose and use of this rather unusual structure. Edited to add a couple of minor clues: It's in the NorthWest quadrisphere. To give an idea of scale, the Eastern mole is approximately 288 metres long.

While an inmate at Cranditz I spent a very boozy weekend here on an "exchange" visit, drinking our naval hosts under the table, literally`. I See No Ships..........Or Do I? Edited to add the proper answer to Q2: HMS Dartmouth, sometimes known as "Britannia". Bloody silly habit the navy has: treating bases as if they are ships. I got a bollocking from a stroppy Petty Officer when I was there, for stepping off the marked path. His admonishment: "Sah, yes, you Sah. You're overboard Sah!". The RAF doesn't treat Stations as aircraft, so why does the navy treat naval bases as ships?

The vast majority of members of the US armed forces haven't got a clue how to navigate even when shown how to use a map and compass. Without GPS they are, quite literally, lost. In the 1990 Desert Shield operation in Northern Saudi Arabia troops were getting lost all over the place and all of the time. Quite a few truck drivers actually drove into Iraq by mistake and had their loads confiscated. One bimbette managed to do that despite the roadway being clearly marked every hundred yards. The DoD scoured the US, sequestering every civvie GPSr they could find and sent the units out to the Gulf to help the buffoons in uniform try to find their way around. Problem was that Selective Availability had just been switched on and the civvie units were showing positions which were typically out by 50 metres or so and occasionally out by up to a hundred metres. US troops don't walk, they drive. They had collossal numbers of vehicles of all sizes and they started to use GPS to follow roads. Inevitably some of them started to believe what the GPS was telling them and they actually drove off the road to follow the GPS indications. Once they realised that they were no longer on the roadway they stopped believing the GPS and they tried to re-find the road randomly. Chaos ensued. A message was sent back to the Pentagoons imploring them to switch off SA. They did so and the US forces were able to "navigate" again. SA wasn't switched on again until after the oilfields had been captured and the Kuwaiti dictatorship restored. Things have got a lot worse for the US military since then. They are now totally hooked on having a couple of metres accuracy GPS 24/7. They simply cannot function without it. Very very few of them can navigate properly at all. Even their special forces are surprisingly poor at advanced land navigation and they flail around like stranded whales without GPS. There is exactly ZERO prospect that the DoD will ever let NavStar GPS deteriorate to a level below full functionality, with on-orbit spares as backup, 24/365.

Upload your picture to the "gallery" of one of your own caches. Else, use Photobucket or similar. Edited to add: To capture a screen-grab: hold down the Alt key and press the Prt Scr key. This will copy the whole screen to your clipboard. Use something like IrfanView to trim out stuff like the co-ords etc.

They're not kisses. They're aiming points for the firearms boys. (edited by a moderator - MissJenn)

Good point HoD. My first find was of average quality, for those days. It was a medium sized box hidden in a fairly pleasant bit of woodland. My second find was in a lovely riparian locale in the lower Highlands of Scotland. It too was a mid-sized tupperware box. My third find was a cracking multi-trail which had enormous educational value as it formed what amounted to a well-researched and cleverly constructed tour of a historic town. The cachebox itself was a small container and was located in the dodgiest imaginable location. It was hiddeen under a fallen tombstone in an abandoned graveyard which was littered with syringes, condom wrappers, broken Buckfast bottles and clear evidence that it was inhabited at night, regularly, by rough-sleepers. My impression of how large a cachebox ought to be was certainly influenced by those three finds, though I doubt that it would have changed much thirty three finds later.

I strongly disagree with this quality/quantity equation. I had found about three caches when I created my own first cache. That cache is of good quality and has been described as such plenty of times. It's almost six years old and still going strong (albeit with a new box or lid once or twice in its career). The second cache I created is also going strong. In fact it has recently been flattered with the description: "It still is high on my list of "Great Caches of Oman" due to the stunning scenery in which it is hidden". My third created cache was a failure. I still only had three finds to my credit, but I really don't think that my inexperience in finding caches was in any way to blame. That cache was muggled, almost certainly within a few tens of minutes of my leaving its location. Even if I'd found a hundred caches, I really don't think that I would have avoided making the mistake I made which led to that cache being muggled. I just don't see any connection between any particular number of finds and an ability to intelligently and creatively hide a cache of your own.

Bolleaux! Do you want a more technical explanation?

I think that if you were to mention Six Sigma to Garmin people they'd have a pink fit. Anything that smacks of proper QA/QC seems to be anathema to them. They seem to have adopted Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar's philosophy that the buying public are the cheapest QCers you can ever hire, so give 'em a replacement if they ask for one and do so on a no-quibble basis. In terms of the FigureOfMerit(FoM) which is so crassly mislabelled as "accuracy" it's actually a crude representation of the average residuals of the least-squares best fit of the pseudo-ranges measured by the receiver. A fix might be very accurate, but if it has high residuals, even mutually cancelling ones, the FoM will show a large estimated error. The reverse can also be true. Magellan is more intellectually honest by naming their FoM as "Estimated Position Error". Unfortunately they are so honest about the squirrelly nature of the FoM that they suppress it altogether when you get down to using WAAS. Once you get down to an actual accuracy of a couple of metres the FoM is just noise. A vastly better estimate of actual accuracy then becomes the number of fixes you've averaged into a static fix and the length of time over which you have been averaging.

Oh dear! The Garmin marketing wonks really do have a lot to answer for. Your GPSr does not indicate the accuracy of a fix because it does not know the accuracy of the fix. In the science of position fixing the word "accuracy" has a very specific meaning. It means the degree of closeness to the true value. If your GPSr knew the true value, then surely it would display that value and the "accuracy" would always be zero. If you want to display and observe the accuracy of your GPSr then you can do it. Input the true co-ords of a known point such as a trig pillar as a waypoint, select the distance to go page and plonk the device exactly on top of the surveyed mark. If possible, try to observe the so-called "accuracy" paramateter simultaneously with the DTG figure which really is a measure of accuracy. Notice that the two numbers are actually quite disconnected and don't even wander in sync with eachother.

Is it one of those Victorian freak show things? Is it something like a "bearded lady" but without the beard?

I think I may have misunderstood the basis of the topic. For me the quality of a cache is all about its location and its context. I don't care if the cachebox isn't like a branch of Hamleys or Debenhams. I want a lovely location and/or a bit of interesting context such as a screed of verbage on the cachepage which tells me stuff about the place or about some interesting event which happened there. Yes, the cache contents can be important, especially for kids. That's why many cache creators list an inventory of the goodies on the cachepage and that's why many cachefinders update it by saying what they took/contributed. The geo"stashing" game started that way and that's still a major organ of the heart of the game, but for me the "Quality" of a cache is about its location and its context.

Don't know. Don't care. Quality does not equate to quantity. Or vice-versa. Not in geocaching, anyway.

Can't you tell, by reading a cachepage and looking at find logs and looking at large-scale maps etc, whether a cache location is likely to be interesting? If a cache location has no intrinsic value in some way or other, why bother to visit it?