Lakeshore Geocachers

Try some cammo paint..and next time put one of those cache stickers on it. one question...how did you get it there?

Hmmm..where to start..perhaps a list of injuries: twisted ankle cuts abrasions puncture wounds profuse bleeding piece of wood in the eye (ER trip AFTER the find for this one) sunburn dehydration rashes insect bites pulled muscles blisters water logged mud covered frustration oxygen depravation Think we got them all covered...

Our Jeep Wrangler is a TB...we are known in this area as the "yellow Jeep folks"...I just hang the TB tag from the windshield mount for the GPS. We "drop and pick up" at every cache we find, it gives you a record of distance/location/dates for all of your caches. It has been "discovered" a lot of times, has been stolen once...before they added the "grabbed from" option, so I had to wait till the other cacher dropped it to grab it back...It never stops amusing other cachers to be able to "discover" the full sized yellow Jeep TB.

By far the worst are those wall clingy things...the wife insisted on taking a Spongebob hand thing from a cache this past summer...other than she pestered me the whole way back up the trail with the disgusting thing, she stuck it to the dash of the Jeep. and as the after noon wore on, it sealed itself on a atomic level to the plastic of the dash...No amount of solvent, rubbing nor abrasives can remove the distictive outline. We now have a indeleble reminder of that one "special cache"...

20 minutes for one,35 minutes for another one..For the first one, I was sitting on lunch break with the laptop in the Jeep when it came up...the cacher who placed it worked in the office is was behind..I went in and introduced myself as the FTFer...He didn't even know it had been published. The second time I was on lunch again, one came up less than mile from my own house...On my way home, my wife called to tell me she was bleeding following a surgery she had had the week before...I told her I would take her to the doctor's office right AFTER I got the FTF...

I go for some kind of sig item,,anything with a name on it, the wife goes for trinkets..she once found this sponge bob thing with sticky arms that she took and tormented me with the whole walk back up the trail...then she left it stuck to the dash of the Jeep where it bonded to the plastic somehow on a molecular level...you can still see where it was if the light is just right...

We leave foreign coins in a small plastic bag with a name sticker on it, we use the same sticker in logbooks too. They are handy, lightweight, cheap and come in various sizes so we can even leave them in micros. We started with wooden coins, then tried diecast Jeeps, then discovered the coin thing. We take them with us to events and will hand them out to the kids who love them.

Got two on my Jeep..yep, both faded and looking kinda worn, but two Upstate New York winters will do that to any thing..even me so my wife tells me, so I just ordered two more, a piece of plexiglass as a scraper and some rubbing compound and presto, bright new stickers! Now if the marketing wizards at Groundspeak could do it. a logo magnet would be cool...even do it like one of the thousand other types of "ribbon" things that folks put on the back. The best one is the one that says "somebody stole my support ribbon magnet"...a fool and his money...

"WAP interface " is what happens when you tell the wife you went caching without her despite verbal warnings not too...

So this brings up the question , "why log on line at all?"...according to the rules, the only official record of your visit is the logbook in the cache, the on line stuff is just fluff...I have been to several where it was evident that I was not FTF, but the person who had been NEVER logged it on line...( He never does..no one in the area knows who he is)..and one I found was signed a day BEFORE the cache was published and was never logged on line...The wife and I are pretty good at the FTF race, but we have no small kids and are able to drop and run at the first sign of a new posting...there are only a couple of cachers in the area so we know who our competion is and from what direction they will be coming from...

went caching in the snow last winter..during a lunch break during work, had a key to one of the company vehicles in my pocket...yup. you guessed it, got back to work and no key...luck for me dispatch had two more sets so it wasn't really missed. The thing is we were told NOT TO TAKE THE KEYS WITH US just the week before...wonder why?

Got a cheap one for you...Flying Private Pilot's licence (from scratch)... 40K Aircraft rental...300 an hour Insurance...3000 a year Maps/nav aids(required) 280 a year headset...575 all the other stuff...1500 And if you want to go all out... cost of your own plane...1500k to 1.2 mil (+ the cost of insurance/fuel/maintenance) 'caching is dirt cheap when you hold it up to the template of other "Hobbies"

Use one of the Maxpedition bags...The thing is almost bullet proof. MILSPEC to the extreme. Don't let the cost slow ya down...ya get what ya pay for!

Got our name in for one...we have to laugh tho...last year it was a Rescue, a vehicle Jeep will never make, this year a Commander...a vehicle Jeep will most likely drop after this model year...If they do release 8000 of them, that's more than Jeep sold! So where do offbeat Jeep designs go to die? as TB's!

'04 Jeep Wrangler, 2" lift, 31" tires, +25 HP engine mod, 5 Speed, 18MPG, 80K on the odometer and rising!...this fall it gets 33" tires and a snorkel...and if santa is good to me a Warn Winch safari doors!

Here is a transcript of a late weekday evening last winter in our house...Time, 10:30 pm,outside temp, -10 degrees, weather forecast, snow mixed with ice. No unnecessary travel on local roads... Me: Hey honey! New cache just came up! Her: Where? Me: Grand Island Her: It's snowing. Me: I know Her: Think you can get it first? Me: Gonna try. Her: Love ya. 35 miles away, snow/ice covered roads, 4th to find... God I love this woman.

The female part of the team had a business trip acros the US/Canada border and I joined her one day to do some caching in the great white north. On the way back across the border, the US Customs inspector notices the Garmin on the dash mount of our Jeep and the "GEOCACHING" windshield banner and looks at me and asks "anything to declare?"...I say no, being honest, and he smiles and says "not even any swag?"...Seems he is was a cacher himself. I also carry the brochure and we have actually talked our way into some state parks that normally charge an access fee or "day pass" with them and an explanation of what we are doing. like most things, honesty is really the best policy when it comes to LEO's...Just think, they spend their days dealing with folks who are NOT having a good day..for what ever reason..nobody calls the cops to say, "Please come over...Nothing bad happened to me", besides,dealing with a bunch of strange people with GPSr's in the middle of the night behind a closed business with a tupperware container in their hand and stupid grins on their faces is not covered in the academy.

Ok, then it's settled. We must play by the rules. ALL OF THEM. No more caches without owner's permission. None. That should reduce the amount of them a bit...No more caches that are not maintained every 30 days, no more wet logs or McToy filled caches that you walked 2 hours to find. That will cull the numbers a bit too... and no more ammo cans...or cammo tape covered plastic containers, or ones not clearly marked as Geocaches or have the official paper work in them...We should get back to basics and have to travel 50 miles and hike 5 more to find a geocache. The thing is that WE decide the rules...if ya don't want ta do it, don't! The only reason we place the ones we do is other cachers go out and find them! Just our two cents worth.

Ok...we can officially place "rocket scientist" off my possible career choices...of 30k (or so it seemed) placed into orbit, only two survived for any length of time...kind of like Kenny G albums..make enough of them and maybe...

Guess I am just old school..I like the feeling of paper! ( I still use map and compass sometimes too)I use both methods (GSAK list and PDA) The GSAK list is in spread sheet form and can be formated anyway you want, by distance, name, direction, what ever, and along with some hand written notes is often all we need...The PDA is handy in the field when she asks "What was the clue for this one?" and I am struck by the random "senior moment"! ...another added benefit of the printed out GSAK listing is that it fills the contractors clipboard that she carries to aid the "pay no attention to the person in the bright yellow work vest" scam...

I see no problem with it. I carry a Leatherman with me all the times so the presence of hardware would not be a problem. I have found more hides that I needed the thing to pull the log out of the container, or chip ice away from or bang on the side of a frozen ammo can (It was my own cache so I can do that) Nuts, bolts, screws, rivets? bring 'em on!

12:30 pm, New York state, Eastern standard time...no luck here either. so much for 'caching in the snow today.

We use a FRS/GMRS radio set a lot..we even used them for gorilla xmas shopping last year..We get 3-4 miles with the upper band and 1/2 to 1 miles with the lower...hope this helps.

As you have heard we got hit with a freak fall snow storm in upstate NY...there are hundreds of power crews from all over the eastern seaboard here to help restore power...one crew from out of state had their trucks parked in downtown Buffalo and last night somebody broke into the utility trucks and stole some GPSr's....I know no one here would be such a bottom feeder but keep an eye out for somebody trying to dump off some good used GPSr's on EBay or similar website...not that a troll like that would even know how to use the internet but hey, ya never know...

Like I said...It was a stupid question...got it now..thanks