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The Forester

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  1. Sounds brilliant! Please pencil in The Forester to attend. Cheers, The Forester
  2. Well done, Geoki -- and thanks FoF for telling us about his/her success. What, exactly, do you mean by "forestry land"? Most forested land in Scotland is either privately or corporately owned. Almost none of it remains in Forestry Commission ownership after the privatisation push of the Thatcher/Blair administrations "our local forestry office" Which firm owns/runs his/her local forestry office? Almost all of the major privately and corporately owned estates in Aberdeenshire have their own "forestry office", often but not always incorporated into the factor's office of the general estate management. We should never ever presume that forestry in the Highlands of Scotland is run by what you call the "forestry commission"(sic), FoF. In fact, a miniscule percentage of Scotland's landmass area is owned and managed by the Forestry Commission. The rest is in private or corporate hands. Sorry to be picky, but could you please clarify exactly who you mean by "forestry office" in this isolated case? Did you mean Forest Enterprise? In any case, congrats to Geoki for negotiating a good deal which will undoubtedly benefit all of us who love to geocache in woodland -- and thanks for bringing it to our attention, FoF. Cheers, The Forester
  3. Other than a First to Find, there is always a great deal of information to be gleaned from logreports. Anyway, you always have the option of studying a large scale map first to make your own mind up about whether the a cachesite or the approach walk is going to be interesting. If the map shows you that it is a layby or carpark cache, then it's pretty pathetic to bleat that finding the cache was too easy. There are several caches which I have shunned purely on the basis of information available to me from the 1:50,000 or the 1:25,000 or the 1:10,000 Ordnance Survey data and there are others which I have shunned because it is obvious that cachefinders are having to spend inordinate amounts of time waiting for a gap in muggles at a popular beauty spot before grabbing the cache container and/or returning it. There are a few others which are very obviously too easy to be worth bothering about. I'm not a trainspotter or a stamp collector, neither am I obsessed with clocking up a high score in the tally of caches found, so I can afford to be a wee bit choosey. There are three phases to a cachehunt, the first of which is planning the sortie. All sorts of information are available at this stage, though not always wholely good quality information on a FtF. It is wise to make best use of all the available information before going to a cachesite. Cheers, The Forester
  4. I've got a wee suggestion to make, Marmal. Let's all get our heads together to make an approximate estimate of the estimated time of arrival of the walking gaggle at each of the caches. This will enable those who wish to meet up with the gaggle further down the river to co-ordinate their timing of intercept. Collectively, there is a lot of experience of WoL cache-hunting right here on the forum, so I'm sure we can come up with a realistic ETA at each of the caches, taking into account the likely search time for each of them and the walking time between them. Most of the caches are quite quick finds. The longest search time I've had was at one for which I did not have the co-ordinates, though I used GPS (Forgive me, Lord, for cheating. I'm a Surveyor!) That one took me about 15 minutes. The rest took about 5. (I haven't yet done the Colonies multipart one. I'll do that on the Day) If others who have bagged individual WoL caches can supply their search time for each of the caches then we can come up with a pretty good estimate for the ETA at each cache down the line. This is for the walkers only. The biking teams, such as Firth of Forth and Roolku, are much more likely to want to start at the top end of the trail as their transit time is a small fraction of the walking time and anyway they have much more scope for varying their whole journey time as bikes have a much greater range of available speeds than Shanks's Pony. Cheers, The Forester
  5. Ulliam, I've done most of the WoL caches and I'm no fan of the gagglecache concept, but if I join the gaggle at the last cachesite, which is one of a few which I haven't yet bagged, or at the destination hostelry, I'd be very happy to give you and a couple of others a lift back to Balerno as it's pretty much on my way home anyway. Better still, you could drop off your car at my place (near Jnct4 on the M8) at a pre-arranged time and I could drop you off at one the caches below Balerno so that you let the gaggle catch up with you somewhere close to the nether end of the trail. It shouldn't be too difficult to co-ordinate the timing, as collectively the forum has a lot of knowledge about how long each cache takes to reach and find. Also, a bit of tweaking to the timing can be arranged in realtime through intelligent use of cellphones, taking into account the actual speed made good by the gaggle. I would then bring you all the way back to your car after the apres-cache soiree without going a single metre off my homeward journey. Sorted! Cheers, The Forester
  6. Memo to self: Remember not to drink tea while reading one of WLW's posts. I laughed so hard at his Joyce Grenfell Class 3b cameo that tea actually came out of both nostrils.
  7. Cache bag + pocket contents: Printout sheet(s) GPSr Digital camera Spare batteries OS Map Scale rule Pencils (2 of, 1 to donate to a cache and one for plotting and note-taking) Pencil sharpeners (2 of, ditto) Pen Orienteering compass Sighting compass Swaps: small; medium and large Small (8*20) binoculars Small first aid kit Small pack of tissues Spare socks Kitchen sink (Nah. Just kidding!) A very small torch in summer; also a larger hand-torch in winter Mobile phone (switched off to conserve batteries and to prevent an interruption in a pleasurable walk in the country by some irrelevant call) 500ml water bottle Summit snack Stout garden/ building refuse bag to replace torn/worn outer bags of old caches Gardening gloves in summer for those nettle and thistle covered places A couple of ziplock bags to replace worn or wet ones A spare blank logbook to replace a soggy or full one Calculator (for those burgeoning caches which demand that you calculate the lowest Mersenne Prime number which must be divided by the ASCII value of someone's mother's maiden name and multiplied by the square root of minus one and multiply it by Avogadro's Number and add it to the number that the cache placer first thought of and then XOR it in binary with the Haversine of the CoLatitude at the Longitude of the carpark to find the cache co-ords in milliSquarks per fathom) In remote areas, such as are favoured by Snaik caches, or on other off-path walks in the Highlands, I also carry a small additional kit of stuff in case of emergencies: A note of the phone number of the local copshop and MRT (and deer management people in the season in that type of terrain) A note identifying myself and giving elementary biometric details such as my blood type and a declaration that I have no known allergies or pre-existing medical conditions; and a couple of emergency contact telephone numbers in case I'm incapacitated in some way A CD. This makes a brilliant signalling mirror if you know how to use one A whistle A 'space blanket' A bottle or can of high energy drink A couple of packets of high energy food A multitool (of the 'Leatherman' type) A NATO standard wire saw A box of waterproofed matches Lightweight bivvy bag (winter only) Two tea-light candles A tiny placard, from an RAF survival pack, which lists all the ASR ground signals Looking at the above list(s), it looks a lot, but it's actually quite light and fits easily into a smallish diddy bag. Cheers, The Forester
  8. I'd like to nominate three great urban walks in Edinburgh, each one of which is a single cache -- two of which are virtuals. One is 'Up the Close and Down the Stairs'. This is a delightfully informative walking tour of places connected with the infamous Burke and Hare. Plan to do it in daytime as the final place closes in the evenings. One which is best done at night is Edinburgh Nights. This is not quite a circular tour, but there are plenty of buses to take you from the penultimate point to the general vicinity of the final point and then onwards to your original point of departure. A third one is a wonderfully well researched and constructed and highly informative walking tour of the neighbouring port town of Leith. It is called 'Ships, Claret and Golf' and is best done in full daylight as the trad cache at the end is located in a place which you might not wish to visit is the dark. Cheers, The Forester
  9. That's a pretty tight window for an ESA deadline. Normally I'm chuffed if they make it within 6 months of schedule! (even the 'as-built' schedule) I'm just glad I'm not paying for it. Oh! I am? dadgum!!
  10. The West Highland Way, Cateran Trail, Water of Leith walkway et al, although all wonderful walks which are lavishly provided with lots of lovely caches, do not naturally lend themselves to a circular walk in a single day, which was, I think, the original question. I have a book called 100 Walks in Scotland which is published by a well known motoring organisation. Almost all the walks, which vary from as little as 2 miles to about 10, are circular or nearly so and it has occurred to me that it would be a fun project to set out a cache somewhere along each one of those walks. The only major problem I can foresee for such a project is that it would get close to violating the rule against promoting a commercial enterprise, ie the book itself, but I think this could be negotiated with the approvers in the same way that we are allowed to refer to Ordnance Survey publications which are just as commercial as that guidebook. Alternatively, we could just 'borrow' the basic outline of the walks. After all, a route cannot be patented or copyrighted, otherwise such routes as the West Highland way and the Water of Leith pathway, all of which have guidebooks written about them, would have undiscussable on GC.com in cache descriptions and logs. Actually, several of those walks already have a cache somewhere close by, but it would be an interesting long term project to try to complete as many such cache placements as possible so that there is a set of such walks ready packaged for geocachers to enjoy. Cheers, The Forester
  11. One pet peeve of mine is when the clue says something like "beside the ivy covered tree" or "ivy covered post". When you get to the terminal phase of the search you discover that all the trees or posts are ivy-covered. Having said that, I must confess that I usually decrypt the clue in the sortie-planning phase just in case I need to closely scrutinise the large scale map of the area to plan an appropriate approach route. This has prevented groin-scraping encounters with barbed wire fences and other obstacles on numerous occasions. Cheers, The Forester
  12. I'll take out a ticket for 15/11/04 (+/- 6 weeks). That's for EGNOS itself to be declared operational. Whether there will be enough Euros left in the kitty to pay the InMarSat AOR-E phone bill (the only relay satellite which we can receive here in Scotland) is another matter!
  13. I must confess to being the guilty party who infected Mady with geocaching. I knew that Maddie the Border Collie would love the whole thing and I knew that Martin would enjoy aspects of it. He's a professional Geologist and a well trained navigator with a great deal of experience of hillwalking in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. What has surprised and delighted me is the enthusiam and great success that Lynn has shown as a result of being infected with the bug which we know of as geocaching. As a result of several ailments, she used to find it both difficult and painful to walk more than a very few hundred metres without having to stop for a rest. She's not the natural shape for an Olympic marathon athlete, so her recent geocaching in Shropshire and Wales is quite extraordinarily impressive. I've seen her stalwartly climbing some really quite severe inclines and have seen the mapped terrain of some other caches that she has done, including a six mile total of hillwalking in one day. She has adopted a very unusual method of descending steep hills which saves a lot of pounding of the knees. It involves bouncing down the hillside on her backside. I wasn't introduced to geocaching by anyone in particular. I wanted to look up the co-ords of a couple of trigpoints to check out the boast of the manufacturer of my latest GPS (my third) that it's accurate to 3 metres with WAA. As a trained Surveyor who routinely works as Client Representative for some of the largest oil companies, I'm a natural sceptic when it comes to claims of accuracy for such devices. A Google search led me to the geocachingUK website which then led me to the geocaching.com one. Within a day I had bagged my first cache and following a gap in my geocaching after a close family bereavement, I was given a friendly private warning by a fellow geocacher that the activity can become quite addictive. So true! Cheers, The Forester
  14. The Forester will be travelling from Fife or West Lothian to the Shropshire Bash on that day. It's not quite as far as Exeter, being situated on Offa's Dyke (a footpath, not a wummun who habitually wears sensible shoes ), very close to the English/Welsh border. As Scottish representative, I'll give your warm regards to Mady et al. I'll also be taking my wellies, for all the usual and customary reasons in Wales. Cheers, The Forester
  15. EGNOS is slightly different for three reasons. One is that it had the advantage of being devised five years after the original WAAS, so the Euros were able to learn from some of the mistakes made by the Murricanes. Another is quite simply that hitech technology in general had moved on in the five years between the inception of the two systems. A third reason is that EGNOS is designed to be forward compatible with the forthcoming Galileo SatNav system which is technologically greatly superior to the 1970s technology of NavStar. An EGNOS position fix is about twice as accurate as a US WAAS one. Galileo will be even better. You are quite correct that EGNOS is operated entirely separately from the US WAAS. The two systems (and the Japanese one too) are, however, completely compatible with eachother. Your GPSr will seamlessly switch from one WAAS to another without any effort by you, the operator. "the whole concept of WAAS was born out of a US military requirement!?" No, not so. The Precise Positioning System codes are transmitted on the same frequency as the Standard Positioning System codes which we civilians use in our GPSrs. The military units produce an accuracy of about three metres, which is quite enough accuracy for them to deliver a 2,000lb bomb to a selected part of an aspirin factory in Khartoum or a restaurant in Baghdad or a religious school in Kandahar. They had no need for WAAS. Anyway, the US WAAS only covers America, not the countries which America likes to bomb. WAAS was a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) project. Its purpose is to improve the quality of aviation radio navaids while at the same time reducing the huge cost of maintaining the vast network of ground-based navaids such as VORs, DMEs, NDBs, and perhaps ILSs in the continental US. "Yes of course anyone up in the hills...myself included should never rely on a GPSr but gee it is just so handy to know exactly where you are when calculating your route in strange surroundings and if I cant see two feet in front of me and my Garmin tells me I am at such and such....it is tempting to believe it rather than bed down for the night" GPS is a brilliant tool for such an occasion. As happens so often here in Scotland, the mountain weather can clamp in suddenly and with little warning. Taking a swift position fix is a very good idea. I teach my proteges to write down the co-ordinates and to physically plot them onto the map, also noting the time of the fix and writing that time next to the plotted + on the map. My concern is not so much for experienced navigators such as thee and me. We know how to use GPS to get ourselves out of trouble. My concern is for the inexperienced and uneducated ones who could unwisely use GPS to get themselves *into* trouble. Cheers, The Forester
  16. I'm surprised that there are so many people who want the Away Day to be held in their own back yard. Surely the whole point of such an expedition is that it should involve travel? Doing it in the Western or Northern Isles is going a bit far, but, why not make it somewhere exotic like the top left hand corner of the country? It has every variety of terrain, from billiard table smoothness to severe mountain peakiness. It is a wee bit tricky to get to, even for those of us who are amenable to carsharing, but not impossible. Let's set the date to be very early in the summer season, like late May, so that we beat the midge season. Let's make it somewhere which is at least a little bit difficult to get to. Sutherland looks good to me! Cheers, The Forester
  17. That's England for you. Here in Scotland, none of the postboxes have the EIIR logo. This is because she is Scotland's first Queen Elizabeth, not our second. The other Queen Bess chopped our Queen Mary's head off and it still rancours here in Scotland. That's Scotland for you!
  18. Mady, Please pencil The Forester in. I'll source three of those Canadian 'prawns' for the barbie if I can, but I'll be there anyway, come hell or high water. I dipped out of the Scottish cachebash in May as a result of car engine failure and my failure to persuade someone to offer me a helping hand to get there. I had to forego the more recent minibash at Kingshouse (GlenCoe) for all the work reasons which you know about. I ain't going to miss out on the Shropshire bash. I'll be there or be square. I expect the Time Lord is there already! Cheers, The Forester
  19. I'm green with envy. I'd love to have done the option 2 thing. Glen Coe, Rannoch Moor and Glen Etive are truly magical places. The quality of light there has to be seen to be appreciated. It is constantly changing and has a luminosity which I've never seen anywhere else in the world. Sure, the choice of week/month was lousy with respect to the predictable midgies. It's hard to think of a worse time of year than mid-August! Nevertheless, I really wish I'd been able to join in the fun. Midgie nets may look ridiculous, but they are very effective. Once we have the first frost (the Autumn Equinox is barely four weeks away) the midge popoulation will be decimated and the Highlands will once again become fit for human habitation and geocaching. I'll be very happy to do the car sharing thing for a weekend jolly to nab a dozen or so caches in that wonderful area. It's not a minibash or even a microbash, just a good weekend of caching in a lovely part of the world.
  20. Well done, Roolku. And thanks to Firth of Forth for looking after your century celebration. Cheers, The Forester
  21. Bird navigation has always fascinated me. I'd love to know how they do it. How on earth do they find a tiny little speck like Rutland?! Are they cheating by taking a cheeky peek at their GPSr? Has an Osprey ever been shown to have found Rutland without GPS?
  22. I set up that locationless after the GC.com one was withdrawn as I was dissatisfied with the (not) given "security" reason for archiving this locationless. Having read the new explanation, I've "retired" the navicache locationless cache entry. I'd hate to discover that a Victorian mailbox listed here or there had been looted, so I think it best to simply withdraw the 'cache'. Even now, many months after the original locationless cache was terminated, I still find myself looking at every letterbox to see if it is a Victorian one. My most recent discovery of one was just last night! I wonder why the "security" guy did not say why he wanted the the cache entry to be terminated? His reason(s) at the time seemed daft in the absence of a reasonable explanation. Why didn't he simply state the reason why he wanted the cache to be stopped? Cheers, The Forester
  23. Well done, Allieballie (and the Wee Man!). Clearly FoF has done a good job of infecting you with the geocaching bug. Cheers, The Forester
  24. What an absolutely magical photograph! I'd no idea that Ospreys had spread so far South. In Aberdeenshire they are becoming ubiquitous and almost routine. I can remember when they were as rare as rocking horse poop. It's wonderful to see them back in such numbers. I also remember a job I did on a tiny desert island in the Gulf called Arzanah. There was just one road around the island and the oil company had decided to install British style road signs throughout the island. Other than radio antennae, they were the only things which had any vertical extent and every one of them had an Osprey nest on the top of it!
  25. Hi, Snaik, I've been out of action for what feels like months and months. This has been due to a combination of a major tech snag with my car and some heavyweight work commitments, together with some very time-consuming land management activities at my home QTH. I'm suffering cold turkey withdrawal symptoms from a lack of geocaching. I badly need to do a few Snaiks and some Perth Pathconfuser caches. I need to get up on the hill and do some heavy breathing! I've been stuck in offices with the poor huddled masses in suits for too dadgum long and I yearn to breathe free. I think I ought to donate more blood to midgies and ticks. It's that time of year. I'm what haematologists call a "universal donor"! This weekend I hope to hit the hillside and nab a few caches. Dunno if I'll do some urban ones too. The Festival/Fringe is in full swing and I've got tickets for a few shows, so I might nab a few of the new Embra ones while I take out a mortgage to pay the parking costs in town. FoF and Roolku have been busy bunnies. Cheers, The Forester
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