Happy Humphrey

How else do you hold your GPSr? Are there some that display in your goggles? I must be out of touch, but if you can have both hands free it sounds most useful. In the old days (2004) I used a wrist-mounted GPSr (which freed your hands up) plus a smartphone with OS maps, GPS and cache descriptions (which took your hands to operate again) but these days rely on an Etrex 20, which does the same job but not quite as well, although it's more compact and robust.

If I wanted to find out what words are currently used for properly swearing I could do worse than asking a few kids - they'd know better than most adults. I agree that without the cache names being known we're discussing in a bit of a vacuum. Perhaps we'd all agree that they're offensive if we knew the context. As argued above, the words themselves aren't necessarily offensive.

I didn't know that "d amn" is swearing. It's a very mild curse. You'd hear much stronger stuff on TV 50 years ago (Alf Garnett, for instance). I love the Gone With the Wind (geocaching-friendly version) quote! The interesting thing about http://coord.info/GC1V08E is that it seems to be mostly found by Americans, despite being in Austria, Europe and despite Americans being notoriously prudish about such matters. "Bitch", as far as I've heard, is also very mild (people often say "stop bitching", for instance, and it's not remotely sweary).

Just out of interest, I'm surprised that a scale as detailed as 1:10000 doesn't show all the defined rights of way. Checking the local area, the 1:25000 map seems to have no less detail than the definitive map (of which a version is available via http://www.rowmaps.com/). Any idea why some would be missed off by the OS? I'd have thought that the OS would be supplied by the County Council with details.

And where people might understand that the series started out as being all micros, hence the name, but a change of name was deemed unnecessary later although it was recognised that bigger containers could be popular.

You could try contacting Kili or bust, who might be able to advise (and is a very nice chap). He seems to have given up caching but his account is still active. I'm not sure why Facebook was demanding for you. Maybe you didn't look into the settings: you can customise it quite a bit.

When it happens to me I'm definitely holding the unit correctly. Usually after a few minutes it starts pointing correctly. In the meantime you can work out which direction to walk by taking note of the distance to destination and making sure it's decreasing. The 20 is pretty quirky though so it might not behave the same with everyone.

I guess that the CO only created a profile so he/she could set up this cache (funded by the Lottery). Unfortunately it looks like the fund only stretched to buying a cheap container and log book, and no-one did their research far enough to realise that you have to maintain the cache after placing it. Probably the best course of action would be to archive it, but then persuade a genuine geocacher to set up a new one (and maintain it).

I don't see your point. For instance, here's one of mine that was adopted; El Presidente. If I'd archived it instead, how would that save the history better than it has been saved by adoption?

The film pot will make a great container for a log sheet inside the Tupperware box. Although it's great that there are so many geocaching suppliers now and so many interesting ready-made cache containers, there's a lot of satisfaction in devising your own. Or at least, customising your own. Mrs H is good at sewing, so for my latest cache (a keysafe micro) she made a neat little sleeve from black water-resistant nylon (with a Velcro fastening). It cheers me up to think of people finding a nice clean and dry container with an immaculate RITR log sheet inside (bought from a geocaching supplier) when they are used to rather sad and soggy caches. I bought the keysafe from a geocaching supplier but beefed up the magnet.

This happens quite often with the Etrex 20 (which has no magnetic compass). Usually when the GPS signal isn't very good (which is quite frequent if there are trees, buildings or heavy clouds around). The direction needle fails to update even though the distance is counting down quite accurately. I think it's a feature.

"Not Validated Premium Member". No caches logged, nor any trackables.

Well, it's been a bit low on quantity this month...but high on quality. I really liked Clue-72's black and white photos, and the frosted tree fungus is excellent too. In fact they're all good. But my favourite has to be the frost crystals from speakers-corner, so that's the winner. Over to you SC for February's theme!

Come on, all you hardy geocachers...there must have been some weather at some time when you were out there with a camera!

Thanks to firestronaut for selecting my photo of a misty dew pond as December's winner. This month's theme is "Weather". There should be enough of this coming up about to provide material, and the chance of an interesting shot might induce one or two to head out caching when they'd otherwise huddle around the fire! I'll give preference to any photos taken this month, although that's not a requirement. Rules: 1) The photo must be cache related and to do with a specific cache in the UK - please include a link to the cache or the GC code so we can see where the picture relates to. 2) Maximum of two photos per caching team or cacher 3) The winner each month is decided by the winner from the previous month - the new winner starting the thread for the subsequent month. They may set a theme if they wish. You can't upload a photo to the forum directly. What you need to do is upload a photo to your geocache log, then right-click the photo and copy the image URL (the address from Properties, something like http://img.geocaching.com/cache/log/large/07afd334-6648-434a-9d78-c94e84d3b47e.jpg). Then, to post it here click on the Insert Image tool and paste the image URL.

Thanks for picking mine as the winner! I had to look up "Silent Hill" though... It was a very unpromising day for photos and I nearly left the camera behind. Just shows how it's worth bringing it along on any walk in any conditions. January's theme is under consideration now.

I don't have experience of Macs but Memory Map say

Another from the excellent Little Quest series; Shropshire: Lightspout Waterfall

Link to the cache page. Very interesting. Thanks for doing that! I see my entry in May 2005 ran to a whole page - I'm rarely that wordy in the field nowadays.

I'm very sorry to hear this. I met John on a couple of occasions and he was clearly one of geocaching's great characters. RIP.

Last Thursday, at Ponds, Dew Ponds and Lakes of Sussex #7

If it's a D5 traditional cache then a really good hide should still allow you to provide an informative hint taking you to the exact hiding place. The challenge for the CO is not to send people all over the area searching high and low and ransacking the undergrowth until it looks like a battle zone, but to provide camouflage good enough that even though people look in the right place they don't see it. That's a really good hide. A really bad one is where you just have to either get lucky, or search for hours until you happen on it 20 feet from the GPS location, or bring along half a dozen people to search. I wouldn't like the Jethro Tull hint...even though I'd get it straight away there's a good chance that others of my age have no idea, and of course not everyone can get internet access at all times. No, as a CO there's most satisfaction when you tell people "two feet from the base of a post" and they have to return several times before they find it...exactly two feet up a post. Which has happened to me. Look at the early logs on this one.

Good point there, Fellsmanhiker. The hint should be very specific where there is danger of trampling or other disturbance. Spoiler pics CAN be useful but I wouldn't rely on them too much. A lot of cachers have no access to them in the field. I've failed on quite a few where there's no hint and no help in the description - very frustrating! The problem being that I had downloaded several hundred caches and only looked for a few, not knowing when or where I might go caching...so they are all on the GPSr, which doesn't have spoiler photos available. On checking later, it seems that the CO had assumed that the photos on the cache page gave enough of a hint. Well, they would if I could have seen them.

Back to the topic, the main problem with a useless hint is that when you can't find a cache hidden in a certain way you can't eliminate the possibility that it's just not there. So the cache owner assumes that people are just not looking hard enough when in fact it's been missing for weeks and everyone has been wasting their time. Cache seekers spend an inordinate amount of time looking in the wrong places even though they've actually found the hidey hole. The type of cache I mean is one where there are numerous possible hiding places within 10 metres or so, and it's known to be a tricky hide. If you search for a while and then resort to the hint and it's "base of post" then a thorough search at the base of any nearby post will soon lead to a find or an alert to the CO. The other problem when the hint is cryptic or non-existent is when you've logged a lot of caches in a day. I often use the hint to jog my memory about the cache and that works surprisingly well...except for those "no hint needed" or "Star Trek episode 9" hints.

That's fine, and part of the great creative world unlocked by puzzle caches. But really, what I meant was where the solution was unintentionally ambiguous. For difficult puzzles this can be a trap for the naïve or inexperienced cache setter, who isn't familiar with the devious ways in which coordinates can be hidden in a description and who inadvertently creates alternative solutions. In any case, my point wasn't whether we actually need geocheckers - clearly we do as they are thriving - but why Groundspeak don't add one as an option to the standard cache page. There seems to be no answer to that.