Lovejoy and Tinker

Sorry, my last offering, honest, don't want to take over things but.... If you want a break from caching and the dog loves the sea, then the beach at Seaton is excellent. Dog friendly all year round and providing the tide is fairly low it's a good long walk along the beach and back. Ideal for blowing the cobwebs away on a fresh winter day. Pub? Accessible from the beach at Downderry. Food a bit pricey but nice stopping point before making the walk back to Seaton.

Yep, don't miss that one. In December you will probably be able to do it any time after 3pm! I would perhaps take a look at one of the Tors (Hawk's Tor (3 caches including the huge cache that is the Award Winning 130), Kilmar Tor (3 including the hamster cache) or Trewortha Tor (2) and aim to finish those by about 4pm by which time it will be dark enough to do the night cache. The parking area is the same for all of them. Then head for the village of North Hill to find the pub. A great afternoon/evening out. In my opinion.

Does the iPhone not have a fieldnotes feature? If you used that, mobile signal wouldn't be an issue and you could make just enough notes to remind you of the cache. Then when you get home, you can upload the fieldnotes to gc.com, then run through them and edit before pressing the 'post' button. I have the same problem sometimes with my HTC in low signal areas, it can be frustrating waiting to get a good signal to post logs. So now I have pretty much switched to making field notes when, erm, in the field and uploading them back at home. It also helps sort out any typos as you can edit the logs on a proper keyboard. That way, I have enough info in the fieldnotes to jog my memory of a particular cache, and can then expand on it if I wish once the day's events have fully played out. Not really even to do with length of logs, just a more relaxed way of dealing with logs, avoiding standing in the cold waiting for a connection to gc.com and having the best of both worlds in terms of logging while fresh in the mind but also being able tell a longer story if you want to. I'm not saying whether you need to write long logs, short logs, or TFTC logs, that's up to you, just pointing out an alternative way of dealing with the 'logging in the field' problems.

Hi Jonsambatt, Good choice of holiday destination There are so many round here it is difficult to know where to start. I am sure others will come up with many suggestions but here are mine - our favourites: Minions (Caradon Hill) - There are lots and lots of caches up here including a great series called "Caradon Challenge" and another called "Stash or Cache" and another called "Cheesewring Challenge" which has some fun cache containers. While doing those there are lots of other single caches, and it's fairly straight forward to work out a circular walk around any/some/all of them All well worth doing, and we have spent 3 full days up there finding all there are to find. There's also some fairly evil puzzles based up there if you want some homework before you set off. Then there are Birdies Rocky Horror series if you fancy a bit of a challenge. Spread throughout the Minions, Sharp Tor, Berah Tor, Kilmay Tor and Hawks Tor, they provide some great walks in stunning scenery. And don't miss Vodor & Scorsby's night cache "North Hill by Night" - takes an hour maximum and there's a great pub called The Racehorse in North Hill where you can have a pint and some good food to settle your nerves. I could go on but won't as I am sure others will have suggestions. But these are my favourite ones in the Liskeard area.

Just for the record, I was talking about cutting and pasting a leaderboard table across 4 racing trackables' pages. The trackables screens have had the HTML style input boxes for some while. Will this change give full HTML facilities in logs does anyone know? You always could put basic HTML into logs, and with the firefox script GCBBCode this was a very straight forward thing to do. If full HTML is going to be allowed, I can see a few problems. Possibly. With oversize pictures being posted, or stupidly large text in a fancy font that's not easy to read. Or then again maybe people will get creative and there will be fewer short logs. I see everything has gone back to 'normal' for the moment, so it's difficult to see what functionality is going to be allowed.

You have our sympathies. I don't think that day is far off for us, with our Zeus dog, but I am absolutely dreading it.

Surely, the date range on a PQ, down at the bottom of the page, is for date caches placed. So if you run a query looking for 'caches I have found' and enter dates at the bottom between say, 3rd November - 10th November, then the PQ is actually searching caches you have found that were placed between those dates, not found by you between those dates. So of your 15 you found that week, I would guess that just one of them was relatively new, and was placed within the date range you have entered on the PQ. That one is showing up in the results. The other 14 were placed outside of that date range and are hence being excluded from the search results. To test the theory, look at the date placed date for the one cache that is coming up in the results. Was it placed within the dates you entered? This would explain why your friend is also getting the same results. Or have I badly misunderstood what you are doing, apologies if I have

I agree. They should be a quick place to stop off - especially if you are in an area you don't know well doing some caching - and pick up some TBs to move on either while you are there or, if you are away from home, to take back with you. I can't see the point of having a TB Hotel that is time consuming to get to. An offset multi would be fine. But then I may be a little biased as one of our TBs has been sitting in a hotel prison for months because to find the hotel prison you have to first find 3 or 4 other caches. And even for those who have perhaps been there before, it is not a quick stop off to revisit to grab a few TBs when you are running short.

Excellent. Is it just me, or has this change also broken the GC Tidy Firefox script part that allows writing of logs on the cache page?

Oh. Ok.

There're at least 3 in the Bristol area that aint on that list I suspect the list is only as good as the info provided to the list owner. I guess the right thing to do is to let the list owner know of any we know about that are not on the list. But I don't know if it is even still being maintained.

Aha, found it - Night Cache Bookmark list What would we do without Chris' excellent "Follow the arrow" website ? Not sure how up to date it is or if there are many in your area, I will leave you to peruse as the mileages will make more sense when you view the list from your account.

We have 3 series down here in Cornwall that use reflective "fire tacks" (that we have found so far). I know of another on Dartmoor that we haven't got to yet. They're not easy to pick out on a map though, unless someone has done a bookmark, which I think they have. Will try and track it down as I can't remember if it covered the whole country or not.

Whoops, good point, post edited accordingly

There's a "Don't show this video again" link below it. I clicked it and now the video is gone \Mette Oh nice one, well spotted. I missed that. Excellent, that is one less problem. Thank you.

Grrr. I hate those too. Especially for our 4 trackables that are in a race and we cut and paste to each one to update the 'leaderboard' every week or so. I also hate the video on the PQ page. As you try and scroll down the page the cursor hits the video and the page won't scroll any more. So you have to steer the cursor to the sides to get the page to scroll to the content you visited the page for. Why on earth didn't they just put a link in big letters saying "See a video of how to create PQs" rather than messing up the page for everyone. I sometimes wonder if these things are thought through fully.

Ah, (s)he put two kisses at the end of the note.

Is it a sign that you're becoming a grumpy old man when.... You see a beer can in a churchyard and instead of thinking "Hey, I wonder if that's a cache" you think "Darn underage kids drinking and littering everywhere again"

What kind of environment would a lighter cache blend in with? I'm sure there must be places where it would not just be picked up and thrown away by someone, but I can't think of any. I know containers don't have to blend in with their surroundings, but I would have thought if you were going for something to make the find more difficult, then the one thing you want to do is make the container almost invisible in its surroundings. Maybe a shelf in the local newsagents?

Somebody getting ideas??? No way. I can think of half a dozen better containers of a similar size as an old disposable lighter. Was just curious as to how it was sealed to keep it dry assuming the bottom had to be cut away to enable the log to go in. It's not even the sort of caontainer that would blend in to the environment to create a tricky find - unless the 'environment' comprised litter so that an old disposable lighter would not stand out like a sore thumb. Seems to me like someone has either been too lazy (or too much of a cheapskate) to buy one of the many much better similar sized containers for the job. Or as I said, it's part of the trend of people trying to use "unusual" containers in the hope it may make their hide more clever or difficult. Snail shells, bolts, rocks (purpose made for the job) are quite clever as those items blend in with their surroundings. An emptied disposable lighter is not clever, in my opinion. So no, I am not getting ideas

While I wouldn't want to comment on whether an empty lighter would make a good cache container, surely the reason they are not allowed in caches is they could cause a fire (if the cache gets hot in the sun for example, or a small child finds it and plays around with it). If the gas, and presumably the flint?, has been removed then there is no risk of fire or anyone hurting themselves with it so it becomes no more than a strange shaped micro, carrying no more risk than a film pot. Part of the trend to try and find unusual or unique containers I guess. How was it sealed to keep the log dry?

Good answer. We did our 1st night cache after spending the evening in the pub (well, we had to wait for it to get dark didn't we). It was a bit of a giggle. Although I was perfectly sober as I was driving. When other people are a little tiddly it's sort of infectious.

Oh well, I've clearly been doing it all wrong, with the incorrect number of LEDs in my torch and the wrong type of torch altogether. Go with what the other guys said, you need a head torch with a single LED.

It really is a great laugh. And now you have a choice of torch recommendations. But however many bulbs you go for, get an LED, they're much better on batteries and when I have been out night caching with friends, the LED torch performs loads better than the traditional torches.

Get yourself a good torch - I use a 21 LED rechargable which is not only quite bright, but also the LED light seems better at picking out fire tacks at greater distances/ The more LEDs the torch has the less of a pattern it throws and you don't get that dark shadow in the middle of the light. Other than that, be prepared to trip, stumble and fall over tree stumps, get scared out of your wits at every sound, and have fun. Oh, and while you might not need a GPS to follow a fire tack trail, you might need one to find your way back to the car at the end, so always mark a waypoint where you park. You'd be surprised at how completely disorientated you get in the dark. Have fun, and watch out for that outlaw Robin and his merry men