John Stead

I am not sure if I have replied to this thread already but I am very happy to help any novices withing reasonable reach of St Helens, Lancashire who would care to contact me through my profile. I do have a bit of experience (over 11 years) and have helped one or two cachers in the past.

Not just W Midlands - four new caches in the NW, each with a different reviewer. Come back Deci & Royal Oak, all is forgiven.

The Meridian has always fascinated me since I started using a GPS. I have two caches on the Meridian both in E Yorkshire. Prime Meridian North (GC1A56) as the name implies is as far North as you can get on land before the Meridian runs into the North Sea (next stop the Arctic) and is a bit of a so and so to get at because it had to be moved back from the sea because of erosion. Prime Meridian Again (GC2BA5) is a bit further South where the County Council has kindly put a marker at the roadside and is a nice easy Virtual.

100 miles for 15 caches? I went that distance for my first cache as it was the only one within 100 miles! Happy days indeed and great to see so many of my old caching friends on this thread being a rare visitor now.

Danny Savage who provided the report from Wetherby also appeared in a feature on Radio Humberside at 8.40 this morning. Deceangi also gave a good dscription of what it is all about (without stutter!) and the reporter went out and found a cache and is now a registered geocacher. The link to the Humberside feature on BBC iPlayer is http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00hlvwl/Andy_Comforts_Breakfast_Show_06_07_2011/ and it is about 2 hrs 40 min into the broadcast (Andy Comfort) - perhaps someone cleverer than I might put this onto YouTube as well. I knew it was coming as the compiler emailed me yesterday morning as I have a virtual in Hull (Going in Deep) but I did not get back to her in time before the recording had been made. Perhaps as well as Dave made an excellent contribution. This whole incident and the coverage it has attracted shows just how much more mainstream geocaching is becoming. I thought both broadcasts were positive towards the game.

Don't know about darn sarth but I think the first Northern do was in York on 02/02/02 - GC3319 Northern Cache Bash, organized by Monz and attended by about 25 of us. The next I knew of was on the North York Moors - GC4095 Great Yorkshire Cache Hunt on 18/05/02, a brilliantly organized event by Dylan Hayes and Chris More with lots of caches on a superb day.

Not sure what time one has been caching has to do with the proposed article but for the record I registered with GC.com on 4th February 2001 but had to wait till 14th April for my first find as there were only about 37 in the country and that was over 100 miles away. So my 10th anniversary of active caching is 3 weeks away. As for how I got into it - I used a GPS to record places of interest when walking, mainly along canals and saw a note about geocaching in a magazine. I am 73 and try to get out at least twice a week to keep my legs working. It is also a great way to meet new people at caching events and sometimes in the field - twice in the last week! Good to see such youngsters (in caching years) as Eckington (dodgyudaved) and Pharisee contributing - and they have both contributed a lot to the game. Thanks fellows.

I could discover it right now if I wished as you have given the tracking number for all to see. Or was that your intention? I think not! I have a tag on my cachemobile dashboard but afaik it only gets logged at events when I point it out or when I meet a cacher in the field; except that I use it to visit any caches I go to (though only one a day now)

I totally agree with you - maybe I am a GOG though! But far too many logs just say "TFTC" or even less and far too many micros are placed where this is plenty of opportunity for a decent box not to mention the cache descriptions and logs where the cacher does not seem to know how to use capitals or punctuation! Oh dear , I really am getting to be a GOG. I even had a cache archived yesterday - but it was in the middle of a field of newly planted crops with no access. Now of course all my caches are perfect . . . !!

But some post it as a find at that stage and again when they have signed thus confusing the cache count.

I have not used them for a while but in the North West we used to use walkie talkies on channel 3-33 and it was quite useful at times if a bunch of us were travelling around. The only snag was the limited range.

Anyone who has read the February issue of the excellent GAGB online newsletter "Seeker" will have read of the new book on Geocaching in the UK by Countrymatters , aka Terry Marsh, published by Cicerone. If you want to have a look at it the link is http://www.cicerone.co.uk/product/detail.cfm/book/609/title/geocaching-in-the-uk

I used Neoreader from www.neoreader.com (for free) on a Windows 6.1 smartphone (HTC Touch Cruise) and it worked a treat. I have just used it on the barcode in the original post in this thread and it decoded it instantly.

I think you are referring to the excellent SBE (Squares Before Eyes) series at Adlington near Chorley where after the first it was necessary to decode the coordinates to find the next one. But with a free decoder which ran easily in my smartphone it worked very well. I think it could be done with any PDA or Smartphone with a camera. Or of course it could be done the hard way by photographing each of the squares and taking them home to decode, but that would involve quite a few outings.

But, if the reason for adoption is not to acquire a cache type in ones portfolio but to escape the onus of having to reply to emails seeking permission to log finds by giving required information, surely there is no problem in giving a different email address for the replies and requesting finders to use that rather than replying thorough the CO's profile. This assumes that someone else is prepared to accept the responsibility.

Sorry - double post

This has made me look at my own caches and be surprised to find that mine at Liverpool Pier Head, about half mile from the one mentioned in the opening of this thread, has to date 245 found logs in 16 months. But then if we were to look at virtuals I have one in Prague which is nearing the 4,000 mark!

Amen to that - but then I think Gaz and I are from a similar generation, in Geocaching years at least!

Well done - that is an excellent choice and one to be looked forward to.

I used to use a 60CS and found that if I was getting near the limit of number of caches it will hold some of the information was lost. I would try reducing the number of caches the unit is trying to hold.

This looks to be getting interesting - here is my effort from an actual cache (Intertidal Footprints - GC1TG4P) last month.

You could do worse than the series of 150+ caches set by L E G E N D based on the Witton Weavers Trail (WWW) to the west of Blackburn. See the website devoted to the series at http://legend.jeremy-r.com/ Apart from that series there are several others in the area.

Did you mean ".ov2" file as that is what my TomTom uses - or am I missing something?

Connect your Colorado to your PC via a USB cable. Then navigate through 'my computer' into Garmin into GPX and delete the old PQ that is in there. Then drop in your new PQ disconnect and off you go. Or just overwrite it! I use the same file name for the geocaches I update regularily and other names for occasional use and things like my home and family addresses etc

I used to have a few problems with the Colorado but found that some of them were down to trying to load too many Geocaches/Waypoints. Now I periodically have a purge of waypoints and keep my geocaches well below 1000. Loading in the latest firmware helped a lot in the early days, which reminds me that I should be checking it again!