Ghengis Jon

Here's the link. http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=174642

Which is better as far as heavy cover goes? I'm going to buy one as a birthday gift for a hunter/hiker soon. The features are nice in the 210, but the H promotes its heavy cover ability. Is the difference significant?

I log every dnf and leave them there even if I go back and find the cache. No disgrace at all. By not deleting, your log provides an accurate history of your GC experience.

You should have screamed "Halt or I'll shoot!!!" just to get her blood pumpin'!

Having visited most of the (few) caches in my local area, most of my geo-caching is done on the road while travelling on biz. I look for caches that will be close to my path, ie not taking an hour to find. Lame or great, I'll visit what I can. A rating system wouldn't have much effect on my caching, as I scan the last 10-15 logs as part of the decision process ("To hunt or not to hunt...that is the question"). I think that a rating system like FleaBay's may be beneficial to some, but I think it would probably be as accurate as FleaBay's....as in not at all.

Lets take the opposite tack of the original thread question. If you've requested a hint, how many times do you even get a response? I travel for work so I get a chance to DNF with little hope of returning for a second attempt quite frequently. I explain this to the cache owner and ask for a hint (or the outright location) so that I might admire (and learn from) his ingenuity. Of 12 or so requests I've received exactly 2 responses.

If you catch a muggle in the act, use his head for swag. It will serve as an important lesson for his cohorts in crime.

Re post #41 Knight2000 - I've been collecting ancients in what now numbers decades. I used to buy bronze in bulk during the Balkan Wars when they were found/sold by soldiers using landmine sweepers. The hobby has grown in popularity since then. Now there are very few legit coin dealers that sell them in bulk due to ebay. On ebay you can buy them bulk for about $2 ea but 9 out of 10 will be junk slugs not worthy of even giving away. But that doesn't prevent ebay sellers from claiming the junk coins to be pristine! (I used to pay less than 25 cents ea for VF quality and higher.) Although I do not buy on fleabay, I understand from others that the 1 out 10 is decent quality but out of a hundred you may get only one or two that are collector grade, certainly a money losing proposition. Unlike Geocaching, collecting ancients has a long, painful, and expensive learning curve. Once you get by the crap sellers, then you have to contend with the fakes, which make up a significant portion of on-line sales. ebay blackens the hobby in general - so long as they collect the seller fees, the coin must be authentic! Even if you send ebay documentation of a specific forgery from impeccable sources such as the British Museum, they do nothing about the fraud perpertrated in their venue. Its all about collecting fees, which only encourages other evil doers. Truly a buyer beware environment. But to answer your question...I give out as sig items what doesn't meet the grade for my collection. I'm down to a few hundred of these left so I'll be caching with them for quite a while yet. The ones I leave are very common (as far as ancients go) and are worth about $5 ea on fleabay today. The upside is I get to combine two terrific hobbies and spread the joy of both in one stop!

I have an old SporTrak, equiv to the exPlorist 210. Great unit, very reliable. Now I don't need/use maps and don't download waypoints. (Thats for Nancy-boys, real men input the data. Its like wanting fresh oranges, driving right by the orchard and buying a bag at WalMart.) I've never had to deal with their customer service. I'm not knocking Garmin, they make fine GPSr. Its all about what you want the unit to do.

I dislike micro caches placed in urban canyons where your area of search is 'narrowed' to a 50 yard radius. Ugh.

My glasses once. Took them off to sign the log and left them behind. (I refuse to get tri-focals, so I can see w/o my goggles in some instances.) Went back to retrieve them and discovered I had firmly implanted a size 12 boot print on the left half. So much for wearing 'frameless' glasses.

I fire a couple of warning shots. Muggles scatter, but geocachers are undeterred.

My first crack at geocaching was a DNF. Confirmed as muggled by the cache owner, but a DNF nonetheless. But I'm good with DNFs. Its part of the game, it provides a list of caches to re-attempt. It also shows the integrity of cachers. What do you think of the cacher that proclaims "I've found a thousand caches and don't have a single DNF!" ?

Oops, they don't make SporTrak anymore. The equiv is the eXplorist 210 in that price range.

Magellan SporTrak is right in that range (about $135 on-line). Great low end unit, I've been abusing one for a couple three years now. Its been dropped in rivers, off rooftops, survived puppy chews and clodhopper feet. A little slow to acquire when re-initializing, but all in all a very good unit. Alot of people here prefer the Garmin product line. But they're buying mid to upper end units. I have heard some bad things about Magellan's customer service, but mine's been rock solid. When buying a GPS unit, always remember the WalMart Rule: "Demand the lowest price, expect the cheapest crap. " Don't buy the $99 no-name specials. Save a little longer, buy a better unit and you won't regret it.

I hope you replaced it with "Tanks, Ahhnold".....

Geo-caching while she's giving birth!?! My wife is far too good a shot for me to even consider such a thing.

And Now For Something Completely Different.....

I could care less if someone is offended by what I put in a cache as swag. Society has become a 'poor me - I'm a victim - look, I'm holier than thou' etc etc group anyway. Its become very important (for some) to publicly swoon because their righteousness has been offended. Too eff'in bad. Let me cite an incident that happened to me before I started only leaving a specific signature item. A wind chime my wife had for years had gotten broken and she was about to pitch it. One of the doo-hickeys that hang down was made of thick glass and about the size of a US half dollar. It had a sunburst style edge, and a raised buffalo on one side that looked like it was made of aged ivory. The other side had a star that was formed out of tiny fake diamonds and rubies. Looked cool but really nothing more than a bauble. I put a little tag on it basically saying greetings from me. I dropped it into a cache (taking NOTHING). Well, I got an e-mail a couple of weeks later from the cache OWNER stating he was horribly offended that I would put devil worship items in his cache!!! Somehow the star became an inverted pentagram and the buffalo the secret symbol of some minor demon. I sent him a note telling him to relax, it was from a wind chime. He responded that I was more evil for placing the component of satanic ritual in the cache. I ignored him. Well, then I started getting all kinds of religious spam and wackos emailing me trying to save my soul. I wrote and told him to desist and stop his freakshow friends, to no avail. Finally I told him that since I was able to get his IP address and home co-ordinates from GC.com (I didn't and can't), if he didn't stop I would take devilish action. I would bring my coven to his house at night and have blood feasts in his yard dedicating the human sacrifices to Satan in his name. And we would take small items from his property that we would leave at the scene of our inevitable future crimes to tie him (in the minds of the police) to our inherent evil. He stopped. I deleted my find from the log, to deny his cache a 'find' out of spite. So I really don't care if I offend someone with my swag. If fact, if someone is particularly thinskinned, I may go out of my way to offend. Those kind of people need to be held up to public ridicule, not coddled.

I had/have no expectation of people trading up. I'm only hopeful for even trades. I expect that 99% will be traded down. I'm not into the game for the thought of receiving high value items. With the cache gone, I'm sorriest about losing the log. I take my kids (age 6 and 11) geocaching with me and would like them to find something other than broken McCrap and candy bar wrappers. Lead by example and all else be damned.

Thanks and you're very welcome. I only maintain 2, er 1 cache and the operational one is too small for swag. I may put a near empty container out at the ravished cache site to see its revisited, but more likely I'll find a new spot in the immediate area and update the coordinates. <Putting on my deerslayer hat> Maybe I'll look on FleaBay and see if they're being offered up for auction....

Yeah, I went out on the way home from work and checked out the area. To no avail. :::sigh::: Holly is a small village (four traffic lights). The cache is/was actually well hidden, its concealment area invisible behind a wall of trees and vegetation. You can literally stand right next to it and not see any indications. On land or on sea, one cannot spot the locale without knowing what to look for. 15 months in a well kept but largely unused small park and nary a problem. I drop fully identified and tagged ancient coins into caches I visit. (I get to combine two of my hobbies into one.) I actually have had more than one GC'er email me and tell me not to identify my sig item because 'cache-stalkers' (!?!?) will follow me around, and then snatch them up before anyone else gets a chance. Well, thats a possibility I never thought of! These coins aren't terribly valuable, they just don't make the cut for my collection. The ooo-aah factor I get to bestow on others is what its all about for me. I will NOT be deterred by a maggot. I don't know whether or not to retire the cache or not. I suspect the thief will return to the scene of the crime in hopes of another one, so I may put a container out there with an explanation of what s/he has done, why it is wrong, what an <expletive deleted> they are, and a sincere wish that I read about them in seven months being awarded (posthumously) a 2007 Darwin Award for a particularly spectacular exit from the gene pool. The cache was the first one in town, I just placed a micro as the second (no, not a lamp skirt or film cannister), and someone else finally put out a third. I will not bow down to evildoers. But I may replace the cache later and fill it with broken McCrap. Then perhaps once in a while go drop something really cool in it for a finder. Who knows. I will also continue to leave signature coins in caches I visit. As a side note, of the 50 or so coins I've dropped, only a small handful are reported in logs as being picked up by subseqent finders. I wonder why that is. Another thread I guess.

A $100 airfare discount coupon for NW Airlines. The more unusual, hence memorable, the better!

I travel a bit, having cached in 9 states and 4 countries. On occasion, after having left the area, I've asked owners where it was (via e-mail) if I've DNF'd. I explain I probably won't be back and would like to admire their ingenuity. Sadly, I've found I won't even get a response of any sort, from the owner, 2 out of 3 times. Methinks some people take the game too seriously.

This falls under the 'just getting it out of my system' category. A cache I've maintained for the last 15 months has been muggled. It was the first cache I set out in the wild, so it has a special place in my GC'ing heart. 6 or 7 weeks ago, it was logged as wet. As the diligent cache owner, I went out to perform maintenance. Dried it out, replaced the seal, improved the resting place. I'm kind of finicky cacher, I don't care for micro-spew and regularly remove broken McCrap I find in caches. Drop in good swag whenever possible. Half the fun of GC'ing for me is the "Whoa!" factor left for the next finder. So I emptied my newly cleaned container and filled it with the following swag: a roll of 1943 steel pennies, 3 packages new AA batteries, a $100 off coupon on airfare, $10 food vouchers good at any airport, 6 ancient bronze coins - circa AD 350 (my signature item), compass/carabiner combos, a small promotional bottle of Channel No.5 perfume, finger flashlights, hemostats, a can of Deep Woods Off, and a couple of very cool handmade sig items acquired from other caches. I wanted a 'pleasure' cache, one that a cacher of any age would find something to his/her liking. Only a couple of cachers visited since the restocking, but the major cache season is just starting. NOW ITS GONE!!! Grrrrrr. No good deed go unpunished.