Pte Curb

Due to the Souvenir challenge, August has been an unprecedently busy month from a reviewing perspective with nearly 400 caches published in South Africa alone. That is besides the rest of Africa and those which we reviewed and were unable to publish yet. Also, August 31 happens to be ROTSIP’s birthday and as he has been carrying most of this reviewer load over this time, Afrika Rocks and I would like to acknowledge ROTSIP for his hard work and dedication and give him a break. We have instructed him not to go near the review queue this whole weekend, Friday through Sunday, to just relax and enjoy his birthday with the family. On behalf of the geocaching community, thank you for the hard work and have a wonderful birthday. You deserve the rest. In light of this, if you submit a cache to be published over this weekend be warned that it may take a little time to be reviewed. {Music} Please bear with us and your cache will be attended to {more infernal music on hold} Your cache is important to us { mindless music later....} Seriously, we shall endeavour to get them reviewed as quickly as possible.

Indeed, a warm welcome to Grant who joins us on the team of reviewers for South Africa and the rest of Africa as well as the Indian Ocean islands. This is in addition to his Earthcache reviewing responsibilities which he reviews under the geoawareAFR review handle. Grant has traveled extensively in Africa and the Middle East and will therefore be a great help to the team with the local knowledge which he brings from those areas. As Grant resides in KZN he will primarily be involved in the local reviewing for KZN unless things get really hectic whereupon he will call on Rodney and me to help out. Grant, have fun with the reviewing. It is a privilege to have you as part of the team. You have our full support and I and sure the support of the wider South African Geocaching community as well. Officially, WELCOME!

Caught and bowled! Groundspeak has picked up that we still had an active Curse of the FTF series alive and well in Gauteng when in fact they were outlawed back in 2009/2010. As a result we have been instructed to put an end to this dastardly practice and thus "Curse of the FTF - Gauteng #17" is going to be the last. As reviewers we have been given a dispensation to publish one more as the finale. Watch this space… The honour has thus fallen on team484 to come up with a fitting end, a memorable cache to close this series and in fact the last Curse of the FTF worldwide. From what I see it is going to be a 5/5 humdinger. I am sure as time goes by and the ideas develop, more detail will become known in preparation for publication on April 25 which just happens to coincide to "QS#29 - Jhb - Kloofing in the Dal". I also have it on good authority that a certain Wazat will be attending that event too where all will be revealed on the "Curse of the FTF # 11 - Gauteng (11-11-11)"… or not. I would like to thank all the cache owners who have participated in this series and proved to the powers that be that a series like this can result in quality caches being placed in response to the "spirit" of the curse to place new caches in response unlike in other areas which resulted in poorly thought out and executed caches being tossed out just for the sake of planting a new cache. To everybody who has found one / all of this series, I am sure you will agree with me that is was a great series and you enjoyed finding them, some easy, some difficult and some near impossible. It was all part of the game. If there are those which you have not found, do it quickly because they are going to grandfathered and should they ever become archived they are gone forever. We thus wait in anticipation and with much trepidation to the revealing on the detail of #17. Bruce Pte Curb

Welcome Grant. It is good to have you on board as part of the team.