Benchmarkone

Oh, you don't need to worry about me finding your cache, figuring it out and then stealing the puzzle. Unless the cache is located in rural Alberta, I won't be anywhere near it anytime soon. Besides, I've already been thinking about ideas of my own for puzzles and enjoying the challenge of it. I am ridiculously excited about doing this in my area and I really have to thank you for the creative idea. If you have a chance, I'm looking forward to your instructions for building the book cache.

Thanks, Clan. That's an excellent summary of the large number of discussion threads about this issue, most of which I read through before designing and placing this cache. To avoid derailing the discussion of cool cache containers further, I'll briefly note that I obtained permission for this hide from the landowner.

This is fantastic! I am seriously going to steal this idea. But I have a question for you: do the cache coordinates lead to the exact location of the book within the library itself, or do they lead generally to the library and then you have a puzzle in the cache listing for finders to uncover the exact location of the book?

I've been planning this one for awhile and finally placed it a week ago. I thought I'd share it with detailed pictures in case anyone else wants to try this themselves. First, I bought a plastic owl from Walmart, the kind they put in gardens to scare away birds. I widened the opening at the bottom to make it large enough to accommodate a lock & lock container, and I cut small holes in the front and back for a metal rod to slide through to keep the container from falling out of the owl. After these pictures were taken I put a metal binder clip on the end of the metal rod to keep it in place. There's a place for a hook at the top of the owl and I threaded two metal keychain rings through it. I didn't want to do a regular owl cache so I suspended it about 25 feet high on a tree (yes, I hiked an extension ladder into the bushes). I used 100+ feet of polypropylene rope and strung it at the 25-foot height through eyebolts attached to multiple trees. At the final tree, which was 30 feet from the cache, I threaded the rope through a final eyebolt and brought it down near to the ground. The idea is that the cache coordinates are at the owl, but they'll only see it if they look up. And when they do, they'll have to figure out how to get it down. They'll need to follow the rope in the air from tree to tree to find out where it ends. At the base of the final tree, I threaded the rope through a final eyebolt and then used two hooks to wrap around the slack in the rope. I attached the end of the rope to a carabiner which ensures the end of the rope won't go through that final eyebolt even if a finder accidentally lets go of it. I measured enough rope so that when the rope is unwound from the hooks and the weight of the owl pulls the rope through up to the carabiner, the owl drops down from the tree to about waist level so finders can access the cache. To reset the cache, the finder pulls the rope to elevate the owl and winds the rope back around the hooks. If anyone is interested in more details, feel free to PM me or ask in this thread.

How accurate do the handheld GPS units get? For lack of better hardware, I use an iPad 2 and the Perfect Mark app, and I've messaged catchers who have logged finds on my caches and asked them about the accuracy of my coordinates and they always check out fine. When I'm establishing coordinates, the iPad shows an accuracy of 5 meters (about 15 feet) which I then improve upon with averaging. Do handheld GPS units get more accurate than 15 feet?

This isn't exactly a cool container but it's got some cool additions to it that i wanted to share. This is a themed cache I just submitted for review. The container is an ordinary lock-and-lock: ...but the contents are all in a musical theme and include a variety of toy musical instruments: The interesting feature is what's attached to the logbook. I found one of those ''where'd I park my car'' keychain digital recorders at a garage sale and made it part of the cache: I also included a goofy horn as a FTF prize:

Hey, fellow Alberta dude! Thanks for the reply. So, just so I understand, you put the cache inside the owl and then placed the owl overtop of a stump, almost like the owl is a big cap on the top of the stump, correct? So the cache basically sits on the top of the stump, with the owl overtop of both the cache and the stump?

That looks great! I like the idea - very simple and doable, plus the hole in the bottom ensures good drainage in case of rain. Thanks for the great pictures, they helped a lot. Just out of curiosity, how are you going to place it? Will you attach or hang it somehow from a tree, or will it be placed on the ground?

I recently bought a big hollow plastic owl. It's normally used to scare birds away from gardens, but I'm going to repurpose it as as a geocache container by putting a waterproof lock-and-lock container inside. The only thing I need to do is to figure out how to cut a recloseable door into it. The bottom has a little removable plug about the size of a silver dollar, but that's not big enough to use. I'm thinking I'll need to cut a round piece of plastic out of the back of the owl, but then I need to reattach the plastic piece in a secure, weather-resistant way that allows it to act like a recloseable hatch. The inside of the owl does not need to be waterproof. In fact, I'll probably drill holes into the bottom of it to allow water to drain. The lock-and-lock will be the waterproof part of it. But the hatch in the owl needs to close reasonably well so it's not gaping open and looks decent. Any thoughts, creative caching types?