BeDoggy

Yup, it's normal. Then, just as you learn to relax and not worry, you'll have a cache plundered. Ah, we must all experience the rites of passage......

Oh GREAT...now I feel envy!

But other listing services CAN have this data. The cache hider can simply cross post thier cache to another site. That doesn't happen much because GC.com is the best and easiest site to use. I've seen plenty of complaints about "monopolies" and such, but just TRY and get someone prosecuted under monopoly laws for what you see as monopolistic behavior. My point is is that this is all just a tempest in a teapot. If your phone company, electric company, bank, ect, ect did business like this site did, you would all be howling with delight about how you are getting so much for free and and how easy it is to get it. Until of course you got used to it and found something else to complain about. (hey, face it....this IS what has happened!) I'm frankly baffled by your feeling of entitlement. The creators of this site took a chance on geocaching growing and becoming big. They could have set all this up only to have it fail and find themselves in deep trouble. I in fact believe that if the people at GC.com wanted to, they could milk this for a lot more than they have. The site requires cash to operate at the quality level it does and I don't mind donating a measly 3 bucks a month to help. I mean really, I've surfed to many "free" sites who constantly threaten and cajole thier readers that they are going to "shut down" because they have outgrown thier server and can't afford more bandwidth. They tell thier users to stop being "free loaders" and to kick in and help the site . When these forums went down, did you see anything like that? Or did you see apologies and a respectful request to "please bear with us"? This hobby is supposed to be fun, but it seems that some would cloud it with politics. I don't consider myself a "customer" of GC.com, but rather a fellow player of a harmless, fun little game that my kids and I enjoy. If Jeremy saw the potential of geocaching and took the risk to develop the idea, then it is only fitting that he and others at GC.com should benefit from their work and the risk they have taken. I haven't said anything about this whole thing till now. But hey, I'm happy with this site. It's free. It's of great quality. Since no good thing lasts forever, I intend to enjoy this site while it lasts. I hope that the infighting and complaining by some won't hasten the coming of the end. It would be easy for GC.com to get fed up and require pay membership, but they've said they won't and deserve credit for that. Please, let's give credit where credit is due. BTW....By "you" I don't mean anyone in particular, just those who are overly critical of GC.com. I'm not saying that I have anyone in mind when I write this, just "If the shoe fits, wear it."

Cool. I'd like to go too. This sounds like a lot of fun.

I just lost my wife's cell phone today while caching. After I get home, feeling all guilty and stuff, the phone rings and it's someone saying they've found our phone and will send it out to us. Whew.... survived by the skin of my teeth.....

My wife got a bunch of vials from work that had "clymidia test sample" stickers on them. I briefly considered leaving the stickers on the containers, just for kicks. I plan on using them for a microcache series.

I was thinking of using steganography as a way to hide a clue to finding a cache. Post a photo on the cache page with the encrypted co-ordinates hidden inside it. Then, a cache seeker would have to figure out a puzzle to find the decryption password so that they could get the coords from the picture. Just haven't got around to doing it yet.

I do this kind of thing all the time. I don't need the string though. With experience I am now able to estimate distances quite well. When a signal is spotty I will search for at least two places where I can get a signal. When the GPS unit settles down I note where the arrow is pointing and the distance. After at least two points I try to visualise where the cache might be. With the amount of evergreen forest around here I have had to use this technique often and it can become quite accurate.The only problem there seems to be is when I second guess myself. I once searched a cache site three times using this method and came up empty. The cache WAS there, EXACTLY where the converging lines met, but at that time I didn't trust this method completely and when I couldn't find it I was sure that the method wasn't working. Finally said to myself "the cache must be here" searched a little harder, and found the cache.

My kids and I went to look for a moving cache called "Fraser Valley Regional Transport" It was hidden under a bridge. It was a very gray and rainy day. Signal was poor and there were about a hundred places that the cache could be in and the hint didn't help. We looked around the bases and in the crags between many boulders and didn't find it. I decided to go up onto the bridge to try and get a stronger signal, while the kids looked in and around the boulders. I set the GPS on the bridge railing while I cleaned my glasses and when I reached for it again I accidentally knocked it off the railing. It fell about 15 feet right onto the top of one of the big granite boulders. I trudged back down to retrieve the GPS, certain that it would be broken, but it wasn't. (Thankfully, Garmin Geckos are really tough!) I got back up on the bridge again, then my son screamed and called out for me. His nose was bleeding heavily, and he and the other kids were panicking. It seems he bent over to check between some rocks and a stick got shoved right up his nose. I cleaned him up and calmed them all down, and we resumed the hunt. I was just about to give up when I decided to look one more time under the bridge. The container was painted flat black and was placed in a space between some creosoted timbers. It was almost invisible! Feeling good about the find, we headed home. My son began to complain about his nose hurting.(I wasn't suprised) When we got home, My wife took him to the clinic where the doctor extracted a stick 1/4" in diameter and 2 inches long. According to my wife, the doc quite loudly exclaimed , despite himself, " Holy S**T!" when the saw the size of the piece of stick. Amazing, since we repeatedly looked up his nose with a flashlight to be sure there was nothing there. All in all, a memorable cache hunt, but not for the right reasons, of course!

Ya know, I'm not sure about that, but I THINK it has something to do with the internet and a battery oprated gadget.

Congratulations, J5. 200 in a year.....Wow. Thats a whole lotta cachin' goin on!

That reminds me of when I was a kid hunting with my Dad and his best friend. My Dad and I stayed together and the other guy took another road. We were hiking with our weapons on a steep, old overgrown two-track when we saw a pair of antlers sticking up from behind a fallen tree, pitching back and forth gently as if it were a LARGE feeding buck. I could feel my pulse accelerate as I eased off the safety and began to raise my rifle. Then Dad says, "wait..." Then my Dad's idiot friend stands up with the antlers in his hand, roaring with laughter. ( He always got a great kick out of teasing me) Taught me the lesson never to shoot at anything unless you can see it completely. So make sure you do what you have to to really be seen.

Well, you go to a marine supply store and get one of those emergency signaling horns. When you get to an area where you know there are hunters, let that puppy blare for about 1 second every 5 seconds. There is NO WAY that any hunter would shoot by ACCIDENT.

I just bought a 13 foot kayak to explore the many lakes and rivers around here. I'm planning to start placing hydrocaches in the spring.

oops

Well at first, it wasn't clear what the nature of the piracy was. When it became clear that it was a positive thing, I thought it was kinda neat. that's why I didn't make my caches MO

As far as I know, other than Vancouver Transit, there were no other caches effected in an adverse way by our local pirate. Since the local pirates said that they would not bother with anyone's caches that did not want to participate (and indeed did not), I don't see why you felt the need to make your caches MO. Perhaps in light of this, you'd like to reconsider your stance on the MO caches? ***** I think I would resort to MO caches if a destructive pirate were loose. In fact, I almost made my caches MO a couple months ago due to the pirate "scare" around here. Now I think what was going on was kinda cool..... I think a cache owner should have the right to make any or all of thier caches MO. They just shouldn't complain if their caches are almost never visited.

Most of the people I know (except my kids) think caching is stupid and a waste of time. Why waste your time outside seeing new places, solving puzzles and getting exercise when you could be watching the fine quality shows on network T.V.? Ya just ain't "with it" if you don't know all the "ins and outs" of the "batchelor" (no pun intended) Yech!

Team Happy Face said: ---------------------------------------------- I will save the track log, wonder how fast I was driving??? ---------------------------------------------- The "top speed" on my garmin somehow says "1874 KMH" It's been that way for a few months. I really don't want to erase it. It's fun to show the kids and tell them wierd stories about how it got that way... they're so gullible! I've had a few "funnies" with the GPS unit in the last week too. Maybe the solar storms are disrupting the satellite's operations.... "MMMMMM....you guys gotta try these geocacher thingys, they taste just like chicken!"- Gentle Ben

Give it some time. Eventually all the places you have posted to will be updated. "MMMMMM....you guys gotta try these geocacher thingys, they taste just like chicken!"- Gentle Ben

I'm wondering how many people first found out about caching by stumbling across a cache accidentally. I've just seen one on the boards today...How many more of you are out there? "MMMMMM....you guys gotta try these geocacher thingys, they taste just like chicken!"- Gentle Ben

I had a cache visited by non-cachers when they saw a local cacher running away from the site. "Saw people running away from the area, thought they were hiding drugs. Your game sounds really neat. We didn't take anything but left a small key we had with us. Have fun." Nice to see that. "MMMMMM....you guys gotta try these geocacher thingys, they taste just like chicken!"- Gentle Ben

The idea I had for an underwater cache was to have a metal ring with a dozen stamped metal tags attached. The way you would log a find is to make a tag of your own and swap it for a "log" tag. You could even leave waterproof objects attached to the ring as trade items. You can't leave a very wide range of objects, but I think the novelty of it being an underwater cache makes up for that. "MMMMMM....you guys gotta try these geocacher thingys, they taste just like chicken!"- Gentle Ben

Ya know, given the international nature of this perhaps we could approach the tourism authorities in our respective areas and obtain some freebie items to include in the caches. Bumper stickers, lapel pins, information booklets, stuff like that... "MMMMMM....you guys gotta try these geocacher thingys, they taste just like chicken!"- Gentle Ben

I really like the idea of a "team" approach to this idea. Say, a canadian west coast team trading with other teams in other countries? By pooling resources we could come up with some really great caches that would truly represent their area of origin. Canadazuuk, why don't you contact me via email and we can put our heads together and then contact cachers in this area to see if we can put something together. "MMMMMM....you guys gotta try these geocacher thingys, they taste just like chicken!"- Gentle Ben