Rainbow Spirit

I think I may have found a way to get my new vegetable garden started....

Seeing that our WWFM VIII flashmob be will be 80km away from where I live, and will be at 3am local time (Wollongong, NSW, Australia), I doubt too many cachers will go, and that there will be many muggles to surprise.

If you don't like micros, don't hunt for them. If you want to encourage larger caches, hide some yourself, and encourage others to do so. Me, I like most caches, what ever the size, but I do like caches that are hidden with style, regardless of their size.

It may be OK to suggest how much better we are now as compared to the earlier days of Groundspeak, but at the moment what is happening is that we are going backwards. It takes longer for pages to load, we are now having to switch between beta maps and the original maps to try and get a list of caches to find. Excuse me, but I for one am not happy with the current retrograde site.`

If I was the CO, I would delete their logs.

Two of my own, which I suppose are not unique. The first one consists of 50mm (2 inch)) dia' PVC tubing, three lengths, joined in a U shape, the two vertical lengths about 1m (3 feet) high, the horizontal piece about 300mm (12 inch))long, all joined with two stock PVC 90º joiners. One end of the vertical pieces is cut jagged, the other 90º. Placed in the jagged cut side is a aluminium vitamin tube container, with some tape wrapped around it to fit the tube, to prevent the cache container jamming in the joiner there is some fly screen mesh at the bottom of the tube. When you blow hard down the 90º cut tube the cache container shoots up and out of the other tube..All of this is camo painted, and attached to some small shrubs with zip ties. The other one is a single piece of 50mm PVC, about 1m long, the base is sealed with a standard end plug, the top has a standard push on plug that has a powerful magnet glued into the top of it. The actual cache is an aluminium vitamin tube container, with a small magnet taped to the side, the idea is that you remove the top piece and use it to slide the container up and out of the tube. Once again this one is camo painted and attached to a small dead tree with cable ties.

Oops...

Even when logged in, when I search off the Google Maps from the cache page, I often get two location icons, one stays in position at GZ, but the other one wanders about as I focus in and out on the map. This is from my PC, using IE. Strange..

Out one day with two micro caches, one to be hidden, the other in my pack for a future hide. I place the first one, but drop the second one, a small home made camoed tube. I search and search, but to no avail! Wow, that was a good camo job!, so I make the lost cache container a finders prize for the placed cache.. A few weeks later a cacher finds it, and now it is my turn to find where they have hidden my container.

I just like to find caches, large, regular, small, micro, I don't care. If you hide them, I will come.

When we set a place to place tandem cycling record many years ago, we had to have two official time keepers witness the attempt for the record to be recognised. Until cachers who claim these feats of endurance do something similar, there will always be naysayers who will doubt the 'record'.

How can you set a 'record' if you don't follow the rules/guidelines? Crazy..What they did was not geocaching, perhaps they need to start a new game of their own.

I have two unusual caches, one is called Didgeridoo (GC23ZVC), and is three pieces of 50mm diameter PVC pipe, put together in a U shape, the cache is a light weight aluminium vitamin container, that is padded to just fit in the bottom of one of the vertical tubes. To get the cache you have to blow hard down one of the tubes to get the cache to 'pop' up, where you can grab it. To stop it jamming in the tube I had to place some insect mesh at the bottom of the tube. If you can't blow it out, the old H2O trick works as well. There are two small holes in the base to let out rainwater, or H2O if you go that path. The whole contraption is about one metre high, and camoed and tied to some dead standing trees. The second one ,Slide (GC1ZC63) is once again a piece of 50mm PVC tube, capped at the base and attached vertically to a small dead tree with zip ties. Inside is an aluminium vitamin tube with three small magnets taped to it. The top is capped with a standard PVC cap, with a large magnet glued inside it. You have to be smart enough to realize that you must use the top cap to to 'slide' the cache container out with the magnet. Russell

I'm sure that will be the #1 thing on her "to do" list for the honeymoon I wonder if they will be posting photos from the cache sites? Could be an interesting series of honeymoon shoots!

Three continents in one day? Possibly... You could start in Turkey (Asia), cross to Istanbul (Europe) and fly to Cairo (Africa). It should be possible to do in one day. Caches available?, don't know. Just checked, and yes there are, so it would be possible.

148, 46 which are mine.. Gotten to the stage where my wife says that I am the cause of global warming, with all the driving I do to get to caches.

The trick, if you do walk into a web, is to back off, without any arm flailing, and the web usually pops off your face! Of cause the first reaction is to flail about, especially if the spider bounces off your face! I also hold a stick vertically in front of me in web infested areas, to clear a path. Very few spiders are poisonous, even here in Australia. Most web making spiders that string webs across a path are the harmless ones. On the other hand the ones that hide in dark areas near a cache....

Here in Australia, we have a related caching site called Geocaching Australia (GCA). It has six cache sizes: nano, micro, small, regular, large and other. If you find a GC cache it appears on the GCA site as a find, but if you find a GCA cache it won't appear as a find on your GC stats. Also GCA doesn't have a minimum distance rule on placing caches.

So there I am, late at night, searching for a cache that had about 10 DNFs and no FTFs, when a car parks in behind mine. Mmmm thinks I, some late night cachers as well, maybe we can join in a combined search? Of cause they turned out to be the cops, and they were interested to know what I was up to. Having been one of the 10 previous DNFers, I had no GPS, or paperwork etc, to back up my lame story, as I already knew where GZ was, just not where the cache was. So I gave them the speil about geocaching, and suggested that maybe they could help me find the cache...Strangely enough they declined, gave me some weird looks and left me to it. Just no sense of adventure in our local law enforcers...

I have a cache that is placed underwater in a local pond, it is a stainless steel thermos flask. It is weighted with some heavy U bolts and is painted the same colour as the bottom of the pond. It is not 100% waterproof, so the log is in a separate container, and all the original swaps are plastic toys. It is tied to a tree root (with fishing line) that is under the water, so nothing is in sight. Another, now inactive local cacher, had a submarine cache made out of PVC pipe, you had to find wpt1 which was a remote contol for the submarine, when you operated the RC the sub would surface for the caching duties. It can be seen on the Cool Cache Containers thread on this site. Or look up GCBD87, it is now an archived cache.

I had the pleasure of meeting a fellow cacher yesterday, and not for the usual reason. While out caching, I got a call from one of my phone a friends, who asked if I had my wallet with me, of cause I.....oh no, no I don't! Well Team Canary does, he found it at a cache you just visited, and he would like to give it back! Seems he had picked it up and recognised my name, and knew my pafs number....so...I rang him, and we met at a nearby cache, he returned the wallet, and we spent most of the rest of the day caching together! Cachers are really the best people.......

There is was one in Sydney, Aust', where the property was under the flightpath of Sydney Airport, and the property had been resumed, and the house demolished. The brick fence was left standing, and the cache was in the old disused letterbox in the fence.

I was caching with a friend who was a newbie to the game, at one of our 5/5s which you were supposed to abseil to. His comment after attempting to access it via some slope scrambling with ropes, was 'it just isn't worth the risk to sign a bit of paper'. So we aborted the attempt and left. So sad to hear of the loss of one of our members..

I'm sure I have seen a description of a cache that was actually a log (wooden) that had a section finished in such a way that you could sign the log with a felt tipped pen that was provided. I have been thinking of doing something similar, is this still a legitimate way to do a cache, if you list it as a mystery cache?

A Silva style compass, as used for orienteering etc, will be fine, and should cost around $30. If you don't know how to use one, find someone who does to give you some pointers. I tend to pull mine out when the clouds are in and I can't see the sun, and/or the GPSr has gone haywire.