chris-mouse

That's exactly what I was thinking of doing. I could run right down Dixie Rd to the lake and come east on the waterfront trail. If I have to be there for 9am, starting out around 6am should give me plenty of time.

What time were you thinking of starting on that bike trip? I'd love to go on it, but I'll need to work out some transportation details.

Tupperware may be somewhat weather resistant, but it's far from waterproof. If you submerge it, it will leak, especially if it's at any significant depth. You'd be much better off with an ammo can, or even better, a pressure tight container like an otterbox. I suspect that wildlife will be less of a problem underwater than on land. The biggest threat to a cache is usually rodents and other small mammals, and those are much less common in the water. As you mentioned, anchoring a cache is critical if it's underwater. Even slow moving creeks can move an awful lot of material during a flood. A cache sitting on the bottom is at just as much risk of getting buried as it is of washing away. You'll also need to weight a cache container to keep it from floating. A typical ammo can will need something like 10kg of weight just to make it sink. That's a cement building block or two. The other thing to consider is water. If it's in deep water, it might well be opened underwater, or at least opened at the surface where water will get splashed in. You might want to try designing a cache that's intended to be full of water at all times. Use a notepad that's designed for scuba use, and tell people not to leave anything that might get damaged by getting wet. I wish you luck with the idea of an underwater cache. It's going to be challenging, both to place it, and to hunt for it. If it's anywhere in my area, I'd love to have a chance to hunt for it.

I was out geocaching in Mississauga yesterday, and came across a white jeep. I couldn't find a TB tag on this one, but could I claim it as a find anyway?

There are plenty of geocaches accessible without a car in Toronto. Both the Humber and Don river valleys are parkland, and well populated with geocaches. My usual technique is to get a day pass for the transit, and use the subway and bus systems to go from cache to cache all day. Check out this list High Park And this one as well:Don Valley

I picked my walking stick up out of the trash alongside a local creek. It's an old hockey stick. I just cut off the remains of the blade, and added a handle. It's relatively lightweight, and VERY strong. That strength came in handy last winter. I used my stick as a pry bar to remove an ammo can that was solidly encased in ice.

I take apart old hard drives and use the magnets from them. I've used screws and epoxy to hold them to a container. I've also simply dropped one inside the container. Either way works. One of these magnets will easily hold an altoids tin, even when the magnet is inside the tin. the advantage of the tin is that the magnet also holds itself firmly to the tin. It takes a lot of effort to get it out.

I have to say no as well. In the last 24 hours, there were only six threads with any activity in them, and none of those are particularly long or busy threads. There's just not enough traffic to warrant splitting the Canada forum into different regions.

I almost always have my FRS radio with me when caching. Like Olar though, I almost never turn it on unless I have reason to believe there's another cacher in the area.

Over the years I've done many things that would be considered 'less than sane' like climbing down a cliff in freezing rain, or up one at night in the middle of winter. in all these things, I never suffered any injury more severe than minor scratches and bruises. That changed when I was out hunting a cache in a city park. First of all, I was hunting the cache in the wintertime, air temperature about -10c (14f for the SI impaired), and it was maybe an hour before sunset on a sunday afternoon. The park pathways here are paved bicycle trails, they're just not maintained in the winter months. I'd just finished coming down a set of horribly treacherous ice and snow covered steps, and was walking along the level ground at the bottom. I figured this was a good time to take a look at my GPS to figure out where to go next. Bad mistake! About three steps later my feet slid out from under me, and I heard something snap. At this point I decided to forget caching for the rest of the afternoon. A bit of cautious checking later and it was time to think of ways to get an ambulance. fortunately there were other people in the park, so it wasn't long before an ambulance was called. Turns out that when I slipped, my toe must have caught on something in the ice, and my foot twisted as I fell. The result was a spiral fracture of the tibia and fibula in my right leg. A spiral fracture is typical of the kinds of breaks from skiing accidents. Six days in the hospital, and several hours in surgery later I had a nice new pin in my leg. Two months later I was finally able to get out caching again - on crutches. It hasn't stopped me though. I used the damage the GPS took in the fall (it was smashed display first into the ice) as an excuse to get a new GPS. My physiotherapy for the leg included doing lots of cycling instead of walking, and it just happened that I cycled past a lot of geocaches []

I shall be there, for sure. If I have too, I'll ride my bicycle over there!

Ok, the problem I have with this is narrowing it down to only five caches. There are so many good caches out there. In no particular order, here are some of the caches I've had the most fun with: Virtual Geopoker A great set of caches. I had lots of fun tramping through the woods in the winter. Parking on the Credit A wonderful series exploring many of the parks along the Credit River. Parking on the Credit: The Mini-Series A perfect way to spend the day, bicycling along the Credit River within the city of Mississauga. Finding Nemo Those of you who drive from cache to cache will miss all the fun I had on a bicycle tour of the little known conservation areas south of Newmarket. GHMCMC What can I say. 14 great caches scattered all over the place and a 15th cache hidden in there somewhere. I haven't finished the series yet, but I'm working on it. I've done 10 of the first 14. The last few are gonna take some really memorable bicycle trips! OK, so I cheated a bit. To get the list down to only five caches You'll have to find a lot more than 5 caches in completing this list, but then that's the fun part, isn't it.

OK, I just couldn't resist posting this image. Sometimes the bicycle isn't quite so slow as you might think. I snapped this image while on a caching trip today. Just so you know what to look for, the GPS is set to display four numbers. The top number is the speed, in km/hr. the next number down is the current time, then the distance to go, and finally the direction to turn at the bottom.

I'm in the process of planning a few bike trips for the summer. Some of my goals include: - finishing the GHMCMC series. By bicycle if I have to. - completing the FLOO network series in one day, by bicycle. - finding all caches within 30km of home - maintaining an average of at least one cache find per day for the entire year. - it may be optimistic, but I'll try to reach find #1000 this year.

Glad to see you like the idea. I'm actually combining three hobbies with my bike. The cycling itself, the geocaching, and the antenna on the back is used for my amateur radio. Every time there's a walkathon or similar event in the area, I volunteer to provide a route patrol, complete with radio communications back to the event headquarters.

OK, I can't resist. How do you flip it over when you're going from land to water?

I was looking for replacement parts for a Handspring Pro, and found this site: Palm Medic Canada I ended up buying a new PDA instead of the replacement screen on the old one, so I'm not sure how good the company's service is. Judging from the price they want for a replacement M515 battery, replacing the PDA might be something you'd want to consider as well.

Here is the vehicle I uses for a lot of my caching. It's not overly fast, but it's great for those off road caches, and the gas mileage is just awesome.

Here's another cache that uses combination locks. Blue Box 7 - sunday It's the final cache of a series of caches that takes you all over the place. It's locked with two combination locks. In order to get the combinations to those locks, you have to visit the other six caches in the series. Each of those caches has one number in one of the combinations. The really fun part is that those six caches are also locked with combination locks. To get the combination for one of those locks you have to go to the sites of three other local caches. There's a small tag attached to the underbrush within a couple of feet of the other caches. Each tag has one number on it. In order to get to the final cache open, you need to visit a total of 18 caches to read the tags, then six caches to get the numbers for the two final cache locks, then the final itself. Grand total of 25 caches. That's good for a few weekends of caching

I've got a couple of ways I can get in touch with other cachers. First, as has been mentioned, drop by an event cache. Here in the greater Toronto area, we get anywhere from 50-70 people willing to show up for an evening in the local pub. It's not unusual for a bunch of people to go caching as a group before after an event cache. ( and occasionally during and event too) Second, use these forums, especially the regional forums. You might even find local groups that have their own web sites with additional forums, chat areas or other services to help geocachers get together. If you happen to be anywhere in Southern Ontario, then the Golden Horseshoe Geocachers site would be a good place to check out. Third, try the IRC geocaching chat areas. Clayjar's chat area (accessible from the front page of the forums) usually has somebody around. There may be someone in your area who would be willing to team up with you, or at least point you in the direction of another cacher looking to team up. Any local geocaching groups near you may also have a regular IRC chat room as well. Another way that I could use is a bit of a long shot. I happen to live close enough some other geocachers that they can hear me if I give them a call on the FRS radio. If you live in an area with a lot of caches, and active cachers, it might be worth a try.

There's a couple of ways I have to pick out caches along a route. One easy, the other harder. The easy way requires a premium membership. Request a couple of Pocket Queries for the area along your route, then use GSAK or GPSBabel to sort through the list and pick out only the caches close to your route. For non members, it's a bit more work. Pick a cache near the starting point for your route and do a search for all nearby caches. Select all the caches in the search list, then download the resulting .loc file. Once that's done, pick a cache that's a little further along your route, and do a search centred around that cache, and download another set of waypoints. Repeat this for the entire length of your route. (I said it was more work, didn't I) Once you have the collection of downloaded waypoint lists, use GSAK or GPSBabel to combine the lists and eliminate the duplicate entries. Either way, Once I have the list of waypoints, I dump a copy of them into my GPS, and then use Plucker to put a copy of the cache pages onto my PDA. I find the PQ method to be a lot easier though. By picking the starting points of your PQ searches carefully, you can grab 90% or more of the cache waypoints in Ontario with only a dozen or so PQs.

I find that if I let the intro run through, it gets a 404 error when it tries to go to the front page. If I click on the link to skip the intro, it works just fine.

Hey, after all the fun I had the last time, you'd need to lock me up somewhere to keep me away from this event! I'll be there, along with enough batteries to keep the GPS and the flashlights going all night and then some :-)

5+ logs in seven days? That's not hard at all. Over the last 10 months or so, I've averaged about one cache find per day. That's seven 'found it' logs every seven days. Then add in notes, and DNFs, and it can add up in a hurry.

After a day, or a weekend of caching, it's not all that unusual for me to put off the logging for a day or so. This results in me having to backdate those log entries to the date of the find. From reading forum messages and talking to other cachers, this seems to be a very common situation. The default log date on the submission form is the current date, which is fine, but the dropdown menu always shows dates in the future. To backdate the log, the dropdown menu always has to be scrolled back to the correct date. Since logging dates in the future isn't permitted anyway, can the date order in the dropbox be reversed? This would leave the useful dates, ie the most recent week or so, immediately available, and scrolling would only be required for those few cachers who are logging very old cache finds. I know it's only a minor annoyance, but a minor annoyance isn't so minor when it's repeated 20 or so times in one logging session, and I don't think it would be all that hard to change. Thanks