storchburp

I don't, but am from Australia too. I think some people leave cards not as swag but as an alternative to signing the log. This has its pros and cons - on one hand they can leave evidence of their find even if the log is full or damaged, but on the other hand the cards just accumulate in older caches and bury trade items. Generally I leave marbles but have currently run out of the signature item I used to leave and need to make more.

Muggles that don't simply damage or remove caches out of ignorance, but actively sabotage them after obviously reading the little note about what geocaching is about.I know a charming example of a cache near a playground that a muggle defecated into, and another who filled half the log of a small cache with very badly drawn genitalia.

Didn't want to start a separate thread for this, but a local cache near a war memorial was found on Anzac Day,yesterday, filled with sheep droppings and a log with comments too rude to reproduce here; and was disabled as a result. My own description of the culprits responsible would be equally non-child friendly.

What about caches placed in or near places of worship? They may have been placed to highlight their historic or architectural significance, but often include some description of the faith that goes there. Is there enough of a distinction between a cache that says "The people who come here believe in Jesus" versus "You, the cacher, should believe in Jesus" etc as an example?

As a gun owner myself I feel for the property owner...the geocache should not have been there without permission. However even in states that allow for the castle doctrine he has to fear 'imminent death or serious bodily harm' to himself or another and a person walking on a hill with an ammo box might look suspicious, but isn't apparently armed or being aggressive. If he'd killed a geocacher he'd have very little to stand on. That said, its not unheard of for drug growers or a landowner with something criminal to use excessive force.

I'm OK with seeing cache items bearing signatures, but cards get soggy and smudged over time and i've even encountered a couple of caches which contained so many cards that trckables were buried at the bottom. Nobody trades for a business card so they just pile up. A card attached to swag will move at least. I've yet to encounter a swag item attached to a card that required patronage of the business in order to make proper use of the item and would probably be peeved if it was the case. Lots of people also put it stuff that bears company logos without intending to advertise, eg McToys, pens bearing company names and contacts etc.

Hahaha Would it worry you to know that in most locations suitable for a geocache that also happen to be within an area where hunting is legal, chances are you would have walked right past someone heavily camoflaged and crouching with a gun without knowing? I have once simply decided to hunker down and wait for fellow geocachers to walk past without seeing me right by a cache, simply because I knew my appearance would be very alarming. As a hunter, you become very sensitive to the soud of quadrupedal footsteps instead of human footsteps and this helps us avoid other people in the bush. Even kangaroos where I live have the distinctive thump-thump hopping noise and they cannot be shot by recreational hunters on public land. I go for rabbits, hares, foxes, wild dog, goats and deer. On a more serious note, safety wise I notice some misuse of the Hunting attribute. I've seen it attached to caches where hunting is illegal in the area and presume that the hider must have encountered poachers or overheard gunshots on adjacent private property. I don't expect cachers to be safe if they are encountering armed criminals who are already there illegally, while the latter example could lead a geocacher who also hunts to believe that its OK to hunt there and unwittingly break the law.

I'm still new to logging TBs and have only done a few, but have considered logging at every cache in order to add up the miles when its mission is to visit certain kinds of caches. My route may not be the shortest distance between two points.

Definitely a good backup when in a country area when on foot, but I've found them pretty useless on the road when the needle is attracted to metal in the car.

No problem. I could go into the various safety precautions, but I do take the issue very seriously. Well the 'Hunting' attribute already exists for caches. That said, I think hunting and geocaching have a lot in common - both develop outdoors and GPS skills, the ability to read tracks, spot something hidden and to anticipate your target's behaviour. I think its a wonderful opportunity to do cross-promotion between the organisations catering to the two activities. Sometimes I read logs from caches in promising areas to see if finders record any encounters with animals that can be legally taken, or else damage to the cache due to animals.

Just want to say that I shot a delicious wild goat nearly on top of one of my recent finds last week. I know locally there are a few other hunters who also geocache but we tend to keep a fairly low profile due to local sentiment against hunting or firearms, but I just want to say...THANK YOU to my fellow cachers and this site for creating an incentive to explore areas we wouldn't have considered likely hunting grounds before, and for something to hunt when game is scarce. Has anyone else here hunted or trapped something nice while caching?

The strangest thing I have done to deflect muggle attention when 'caught' was to act like a madman. I suddenly did a hula dance, sat down on the pavement and cackled with laughter. Got them moving away pretty quickly.

There is a two-pack you can look for that contains the Leatherman Skeletool and the Leahterman Style in a single package. Might be a good deal if you take the bigger Skeletool into the woods and camping, and the Style for urban caches.

Good luck! She sounds like one lucky girl. A more mundane thing I notice is lots of people releasing geocoins and trackables to celebrate the occasion - surely you could work that into your plans?

Shoulder bag GPS pen notebook camera swag items, grouped by size first aid kit cleaning brush sunscreen water bottle (if in applicable area) hunting rifle + ammo multitool flashlight smaller pens - handy swag for caches with no writing instruments knife big icebox The icebox is the silly part. After encountering a 1-star difficulty cache that was evidently easy for someone two feet taller than I was, with nothing I could climb on, on the way back from a hunt, I ended up grabbing the icebox full of meat from my car and using it as a footstool. Since then, I take the empty icebox to taller urban caches and can sit down next to it and look like a picnicker if muggles are watching.

Not sure if this has been asked before, but after reading through someone's blog talking about the fates of over 200 TBs she released over a few years I had the inkling that some TBs that would seem to be politically or religiously charged might end up being lost when they fall into the hands of someone that hates what it stands for. The easiest example to explain might be a TB bearing a cloth patch depicting the a flag of a country finding its way into a cache in another country with which it is at war with, but given that most TBs stay in their country of origin, I'm thinking of more local 'hot-button' topics like religion, race, individual politicians etc. I doubt that it would ever be possible to certainly say that such TBs come to grief more frequently, but it would make sense. Hypothetically, if as a cacher you discovered a TB attached to a figurine of the poitician you hated with every fibre of your being, and it had an explanatory card attached talking about how great and awesome he/she is, what would you do? I would NOT enjoy moving it on and leave it in the cache, but other cachers might show less restraint. Even if it is not lost, that TB is already disadvantaged and may not travel as far as one attached to a plastic zebra. I am very thankful for this thread, unfortunately I made the grave mistake of not attaching any info to my first TB. On the bight side it is valueless, has a massive hole drilled through it, and is in a cache that has been rarely accessed so hopefully it has a good start in the hands of a more experienced and dedicated cacher. The first TB I picked up had no info so I simply repeated the same mistake...will not do that again.

A friend of mine came upon a fairly large cache while hunting, and he did not have an internet connection back then. He used a whole log page to write about how we are all insane nutters to climb to the top of a windy, icy mountain just to swap novelty erasers and drew a few silly stick figure cartoons expressing his disbelief...but left behind a keychain just to entertain us anyway.

I understand the practical constraints that result in the proportion of micros and am lucky to live in a country town where small-regular caches are the majority; although finding a micro with a soggy logbook on a dirt track through the forest without a building in sight is a bit of a 'meh' moment. The only thing that I prefer about the bigger containers is that I can place little surprise toys and trinkets in there as I have a personal agenda to encourage children to get off the Xbox and into the outdoors, and take very little in return. The interior of my cache bag looks like Santa's sack!

Or you could have just not gone after the cache in the first place. That doesn't sound like a location I'd like to be spending time while not giving traffic my undivided attention. I'm not going to roll over and accept that I cannot access some caches because of my skin colour, while I am doing nothing illegal. I wasn't saying anything about your skin color. I'm saying that despite it being "public land", if a location is that dangerous due to the traffic, why are you standing there in the first place? Ah, sorry I misunderstood you. The cache itself is in the roadside vegetation, the best parking spot is in a lane branching off the opposite side of the road. A pedestrian could legally walk down either side of the road; although in this particular area, pedestrians aren't common. The SUV was following me while I was on the side with the cache. The risk involved, to most people, would be no more than that of crossing a moderately used road and standing beside it, as compared to a 5-star cache I did wo days ago which had me 10m up a tree lol. In the past, if I stood my ground when drunk people yelled at me, they would escalate to throwing things, so I could not linger over the cache location and hope to sign it while they were badgering me. They left only when I jumped back into my own car. Attempting to retrieve the log then would have also revealed its location and given the nature of the people (and i use that term generously) involved, likely resulted in its gleeful destruction.

Or you could have just not gone after the cache in the first place. That doesn't sound like a location I'd like to be spending time while not giving traffic my undivided attention. I'm not going to roll over and accept that I cannot access some caches because of my skin colour, while I am doing nothing illegal. All the more, I am going to make special effort to sign that micro, to spit in the face of anyone that tries to stop me. It is public land. I think I'm already giving them too much credit by even considering returning at night. When you have a field of view free of muggles for as far as the eye can see, but the road allows a vehicle to approach in the time it takes for you to make two steps, I'm not going to avoid doing a cache just because I'm the only non-white person for miles and really need to get into that bush while clutching a GPS. I have met too many racist people here that claim that minorities and immigrants should leave because they 'don't assimilate'. Surely by doing a 'white man's' activity I am assimilating. Maybe I should take geocaching as a sort of crusade that will put me in locations that will challenge them.

That's it. I'm doing urban geocaches after midnight now, or will find myself a caching team or partner, after the experience today of being yelled racial insults at AGAIN and also driven off a roadside cache by a small mob of young muggles in an SUV. Cache was along an 80kph road and there was no way I could have hid or evaded them.

I pick my caches wherever I am going. If I am just driving someplace in a hurry, then its pretty much no more than 300m. If I'm on foot hiking or hunting, I would be covering many kilometres in a day and a cache might be a 2km round trip off whatever I'm up to.

I'm also a student using a secondhand Etrex 10. Just a bit of advice...consider advertising in your campus's noticeboards near the environmental, geology, natural resource management, forestry etc departments. Lots of postgraduate students and researchers obtain grants for field equipment including GPS devices and have no further use for them when they have completed their projects. Since they hardly had to pay for them, they will likely sell them off quite cheaply. University equipment also gets outdated and replaced regularly so older models might come up on sale if you ask technical assistants.

Agreed. I suspect that the listing of TBs is resulting in members signing up just to pinch them. All too often I'm reading logs where a trackable has disappeared between two consecutive Found Its

I might add that aside from my first cache, geocaching for me has been enjoyable. I think the lack of 'minority' geocachers is also due to the lack of internet access in some countries, and most of the population being too poor to own a GPS-capable device. If you look at cache logs from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Mexico, you will find many logs that aren't written in English or usernames that are also clearly not English. Relative to the United States, these countries have good internet access and a large enough population who can afford a device.