ariwa

THG - you wouldn't have SEEN me fall in the stream, it was pitch black! duh ... you offered? when?! besides.. you would have just been a liability ... the team can only go as slow as the slowest person :-) Ray - yeah, why not, wouldn't mind going up there again particularly with someone who knows where they're going I'll email you my phone number.

Hey no sweat Navigull, you seemed to describe the area and the cache well, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with your cache description. But a warning about cellphone coverage would be helpful, although I've been on many a cache where there's no coverage!! The area is very scenic, I agree, but its an entirely different story at night! I just can't get over how many times I walked straight into the stream without realising it! The only reason it happened was my lack of judgement re sunset..and to think most GPSs have a function that tells you when sunset is. Sheesh! Had there been light, I would have made my way out a lot easier !! So no, don't feel bad... Me too, I'm glad I got out last night - I mean, if I had to I would have tried to sleep out there but ugh, I had wet clothes on which made it a little cold. BaldEd...epic alright! If there's any directors out there ... I am happy to sign over rights It kinda reminds me of that movie about the Erebus disaster where all the survivors eat the dead people

Well, I'ld like to take full honours for the very first (unintentional) attempt at Jackass Geocaching. Please, sit back and allow me to make a mockery of myself by describing this afternoons/evenings bafoonery. Johnny Knoxville will be proud of me. This afternoon seemed like such a premium time to go searching for Navigulls' What is on the Menu? cache. So off I went, dressed in T shirt and jeans and hiking boots, with a backpack full of about 2L of water and drinks, GPSr, Cellphone, and something to put in the cache. Pretty decently prepared for a 3 1/2 hour return trip right? I went in this afternoon at about 1/4 to 4, and expected to be out by 6.30 at the latest (I tend to walk fast when I'm alone). It's now, like midngiht, as I write this. Luckily I "prepared", and bought a torch on the way there just in case it began to get dusky while I was coming back. Oh boy, I had no idea. Had a great drive down Anawheta (sp?) Road in my little bomb, bit of a Sega Rally. Passed some teenybopper who'd taken a corner too fast and thrown his Skyline down a bank and was standing there looking lost talking on the cellphone, and no he didn't require help, I asked. (Moral: be careful down the road, especially if you're not a legendary driver like me <!--graemlin:-->) So in I go with all the WP's in the cache loaded on the GPSr (phew). First I park the car at the place described, go down the hill to the beach, walk along the beach, and find the spot to go inland. Time, about 4.15. So far so good, no problems as long as I keep up a pace and beat dusk. I drag my *** up the hill, suffering 10 coronaries along the way (gee and I thought I was fit?!) and find the track heading towards the stream. Cool, again, no problems. Start heading along the track with the cutty grass and after falling down a couple of potholes I get to the stream with a muddy butt. No problems, I think at this point it was probably... 4.45? I find the pink/white/yellow tags on the trees and start heading upstream. Got into a few problems keeping on the right track, and lost the tags, but kept to the stream and eventually made it to the waterfalls. By this time, it's what, 5.20, and I notice that it's slowly but surely starting to get dark. Oh dear. So I started scrabbling around for the cache, used the clue, couldn't find it. 5.35 I decided when I started having to use the torch to scrabble around the bases of trees, that this was probably worth aborting. So I turn around and start heading back. What happened next was a bit of a blur but I'll try and timeline it.. 5:40 - Lost all notion of anything resembling a track, thoroughfare, tags on trees. Begin to think that this was a very bad idea. Check cellphone. No coverage. Argh. But it's still light enough to see, so I'll keep going. Stupid sun! 5.56, NFI where I am apart from close to the stream, begin bushbashing and trying to find tags on trees using stupid Chinese made torch that only seemed to work when I had my finger firmly pressed on the switch. 6.25pm. It's completely dark. Uncle Steve is relyingo n crappy torch and getting just a little bit worried and beginning to prepare himself emotionally for the realism of spending the night under the stars. 6.35pm. While bushbashing, fell down about 8ft into stream. Ow. Bugger, now I'm wet. GPS still goes. Cellphone still goes (no coverage). Chinese torch still goes. Legs still go. Scramble out of stream and lie in a bush for a few minutes to collect thoughts and drink, then begin to get claustrophobic because I was stuck in a really nasty area of dense bush. Pointlessly yell for help a few times. 6.45 - Begin bushbashing again. Find small clearing, possibly part of 'track'? Walk for a while then turn a corner and, whoops, blocked by bush. Check GPS again and realise I've been going the wrong way, was down to about 270m before falling into the stream, now 330m. Turn around and get back to roughly where I started after I fell in the stream. Crossed stream downstream a bit and carried on through a clearing for 20m or so before having to bush bash again. 7pm - fell into stream again while bush bashing. No GPS coverage. NFI if I'm going in the right direction. 7.30pm - After getting pretty desperate I come across a tag tied to a tree. Still don't know if I'm going the right way but atempt to navigate my way back to the path by following tags. Cross the stream a couple more times, fall IN the stream a couple more times, get lost a couple of more times, begin to get really, reall exhausted. Get a stick up my nose while bush bashing and have the extra delight of blood pouring out all over my shirt. 8pm: GPS coverage! WP for end of track only 90m away. Bush bash my heart out and fall in the stream again. Hope begins to flood my veins again though, now only 60m. 8.25 - Only 20m away, but can't find the track leading up the hill. The jackass theme song begins playing through my mind and I start questioning my sanity.. But then I find it. Up I go like a drunken schoolgirl following the quite defined path back to civilisation. The pain of cutty grass slicing my skin to shreds was bliss. 8.40 - after falling over, like, 20 times, down potholes and slipping over, Uncle Steve gets to 2nd WP, where you're supposed to turn left. Uncle Steve proceeds to turn right (obviously the opposite on the way back!) but doesn't seem to turn right far enough and ends up bush bashing after 35m. Then I fall down a hill which, with my energy levels, I just can't get back up and backtrack. Now hopelessly lost, once again and end up at the bottom of a steep valley in regenerating forest. No cutty grass, no grass, nothing but trees trees and more trees. 8.42 - Beginning to wonder if I should start believing in God. Begin bushbashing til I'm 130m away from the next WP where you head inland off the beach. Bushbash another 50m and end up collapsing in a delicate mixture of cutty grass and some other stuff, but I notice that the ground is turning to sand now and I can definitly hear the ocean. Or is that just a hallucination? Drink the rest of my drink just to be sure. 9.05 - After nearly falling asleep I decide that last 80m is worth a shot and that I really didn't want to spend the night shaving my skin off in the cutty grass. Mustering up my 2nd to last notion of strength I bush bash through and make it to the grassy part, downhill and .... 9.15 - collapse again, now on the beach. Sand never felt so good. Nyargh, no trees. No grass, no cutty grass. Oh yeah. Again the Jackass theme roars through my head andI get up heading towards the entrance to the beach from the carpark. 9.25 - Another step to civilisation, I find the nasty uphill track heading back to the carpark and sigh relief. 9.30 - Can barely walk. dadgum steep hill. Have another coronary. Muster up and use last strength 10 times over. 9.50 - Find the car still there, unstolen and unscathed. Collapse on bonnet and smile. So there you have it. The moral of this story... DONT be a Jackass and keep in mind that the sun sets a lot quicker and sooner now daylight savings is over. If you're planning on going on a Geocache that takes even a semi long to get to, take plenty of drink and even snacks, a cellphone, and maybe a torch and a compass. (If I had cellphone coverage it wouldn't have been Jackass Geocaching but Search and Rescue Geocaching <!--graemlin:-->) Tell someone where you're going (I forgot, whoops) and if you can, take someone with you, (I didn't, whoops), there's always something nice about having someone else there to lie in the bush with. And another thing, I involuntarily found that it's easier to bush bash on your hands and knees than standing! I can only but dream of the smart comments this thread is going to generate.. Steve Knoxville *** Edited to activate links using UBB code as new forums don't work with HTML ***

Hey M@, Re Spring Geometry - I just sat behind the tree and filled it in. I approached through the bush anyway so people weren't even aware I was there.. tho it was tempting to play the 'public annoyance' card and go spooking people by running around in the bushes :-) Dwarf - no problems, I can only hope it induces us all to put some real crazyness into our caches :-)

http://www.purenz.com/homeofmiddleearth/ Found this awesome site. Has lots of locations and links to driving guides for rings sets. Steve

Oh, as for hiding places.. I found caches inbetween cracks in buildings, under band rotundas, inside the hollow inbetween two main branches of a gumtree, inside a streetlamp, at the base of a sculpture in a busy park, in a bush beside a tomb in a graveyard....

Don't get me wrong..A number of their caches are similar to ours - somewhere in some bush, right at the location that is promised. But the multicaches are very deceptive.. One I went on was where you went to WP1, added a date you read off a plaque to some more co-ordinates, and then you should have, according to the description, expected to find the cache at the new co-ordinates. Nope. What I found instead was a 35mm film canister under a tree with further instructions to solve a "cryptorithm", and the answer was the number of footsteps away from the tree the cache actually was. No bearings were given either! I spent 1/2 an hour sitting by the tree trying to solve the cryptorithm but couldn't (duh) Then there's all the urban caches that they hide right near the starts of popular walking tracks, where about groups of people are constantly walking past - so you have to be quick, they call this a 'stealth cache', where you try to find the cache not looking suspicious, then grab it, take it elsewhere to fill in the logbook, then return it just as stealthily. They're nasty. The last one I went to was in Hyde Park, which is constantly busy all day. I triedfinding the cache after around 6pm when things died down but by then, the hidey hole they hid the cache in was too dark to see the cache. So I found it, only at 1pm when there were about 100 eyes affixed to me ("heh, don't worry guys, I'm just fixing this here light"). To top it all off the cache was so small it didn't have a pen in it, so I had to borrow someone's pen! So there you go... Steve

Having being shoved on a plane to Sydney for some training for work provided me an excellent chance to do some caching over here in my limited spare time. Just have to say - wow - I'm sorry - but the caches at least in Sydney are pretty spectacular both in terms of choice of location (we pride ourselves on having such a beautiful country but compared to some places over here, it's pretty bland!), and even cache containers, multicaches and puzzles. As a result I had hoped to find a lot more initially than I actually have due to the extra time it's taken trying to think outside the square to find them! These caches have given me some awesome ideas to try back home next time I make my next cache! Steve

Hi guys, I'm over here in Sydney til Thursday. Have found a few caches but have found that many more are a lot more challenging than I expected. It's obvious a lot of thought and preparation has gone into a lot of the excellent caches here both in terms of concepts and in terms of the locations that they are placed! It's given me some good ideas for some caches back in New Zealand, where many are simply dumped in shrubs or under a tree somewhere and are usually something boring and normal like a large peanut butter jar or something. Hey if anyone here wants to help me in the very limited time i have left before going back home, in finding a few caches let me know, it's all a numbers game :-)

I'm going to Seednee in a month or so for a few days and am going to devote a couple of days to Geocaching Just wondered if anyone has any Travel Bugs that would like a lift across the Tasman! Steve "I'm not a courier" Perich

Hi All, I'm going to be in Sydney from 22 Mar through 27 Mar and to fill in my weekend I was thinking of renting a car and trying to find a few geocaches in / around Sydney. Would anyone have any recommendations of GCs in Sydney, especially quick and easy ones? I am in a training course during the week somewhere close to Circular Quay so I would only have the weekend realistically to get out and about (unless there are some very close to the city that I can get to on public transport) And if anyone's wanting to meet up with a fellow GCer from the other side of the ditch I'm happy to meet up for a few brews.. Please email steveNOSPAM AT clubpoint DOT co DOT nz and let me know. I also have a TB whos intent it is to visit Oz that needs to be planted! :-) Cheers guys Steve

To the highest bidder. Steve

Was thinking $300 for the t-rex, carry case and data cable. Steve

Hey good site. For some reason it reminded me of Robin Lovelock's GPSS site though rest assured - it's definitly not a cosmetic similarity! Completely unrelated, I'm doing a speech at Toastmasters on Monday evening on Geocaching! The speech objective is to "show what I mean" by using movement, facial expression, eye contact etc. I figured running around the stage searching for a cache (which makes a great prop) would help me a great deal in that respect. The alterior motive of course is to hopefully get a few new rookies on board too Steve

Hi everyone, I have just eBay'ed myself a Garmin GPS 12 and when (if?) it ever arrives I will have my year-old eTrex up for sale. It's the basic yellow model, v2.14 firmware. Is in great condition as I bought a carry case (http://www.dse.co.nz/cgi-bin/dse.storefront/3e2103f60421a8ec273fc0a87f9906b4/Product/View/D3485) for it as soon as I bought it. I also have a DB9 serial cable for it.. Works great with everything from TUMONZ through EasyGPS. As everyone out there already has a GPSr I would consider selling the carry case and DB9 cable seperately to eTrex owners out there. Alternatively I'll accept offers on the whole lot, if someone out there has a friend who wants to get into Geocaching If you're keen, email steve at clubpoint dot co dot nz (replace at and dot with @ and . respectively :-)) Steve

But you DOC employees would have those big GPSrs that fit in backpacks and have aerials towering above your heads, wouldn't you? I suppose at least you'd get 30cm accuracy even if you did look like a dork :-) Steve

Count me in too! :-)

I wish Jeremy would open the db up somehow so you could query it directly rather than having to parse lots of webpages!.. Anyway..just my 2c worth..I'm gunna go and enjoy NY day. happy new year! Steve

Hi, We've just returned from a cache mission down the BoP and Coromandel and just wanted to say thanks to those cachers down there, especially Spudgun & Pam, tgsnoopy and Klaymen, for the excellent caches and picking of great locations Next time we go I'll have to grab your phone numbers to see if we can meet up.. Or even better beg to pitch a tent on your lawn Steve, Liz, Rachel & Simon

I'm doing a cache run up there in a few weeks or so and I have an unregistered TB so I'll put it up there for ya

Hi there Just been studying the map and noticed that it hasn't automatically updated itself since the 22 of December. Steve

Actually this has crossed my mind before.. Not necessarily to reward those who find a really difficult cache, but more for the sake of a cache with items of higher value.. A "high flyers club" cache! A pre-requisite to visiting the cache would be that you would have to leave an item of the same or higher value (well, roughly) than what you took..This might stop the digital cameras and the DVDs being replaced with happy meal toys Of course it would kinda suck if it was badly placed and someone pillaged it. Steve

I'll have a nerd chick wearing a Geocaching bucket hat thanks

Neill are you getting commission on those GPS12s or something?! I'm still convinced there's little difference between the eTrex and the GPS12 (apart from the fact the eTrex looks cooler and has a 4-level grayscale screen!) Steve

Someone post a URL of this members only cache?