Poppa Duck

Way to go Floopy - congrats !! I remember meeting up with him at a cache right before he hit 3K many moons ago. -PD

Talk about bad timing. Sorry DonMurph - I was out caching West Hills and showing some friends the ropes on Saturday. If only I had read the forums first, you could have joined in (bad Poppa, bad Poppa). Maybe next time. Seeing you're local to Huntington, perhaps I'll see you out there. -PD

Way to go Floopy!!!!

I've seen where owners relocate the cache using the same listing and explicitly state that it is OK to re-log. You can either ask before hand if it doesn't state it or just go ahead and log it and let it be known that it's a second find and you don't mind deleting if the owner doesn't want it there. There have been cases with my own caches that it's been six plus months without a find and I will log a find when I do a maintanence visit just to let people quickly see that it's still out there. -PD

If Avroair doesn't take on the task, Poppa will. I work on 14th St and walk up to Penn Station each day. - PD

I found two wondering across my jacket after caching in West Hills park last week. But in general I've had to pull very few off this season... -PD

Very sad news - may he rest in peace...

Huntington's my hometown - would love to help but we're heading further east for the weekend. Definately head for West Hills (one of mine is out there - put out there by the Scouts). -PD

They usually cross post things on their website - but in this case I can't find anything. -PD

If you're going to be in SE Long Island (East Hampton to Montauk area) do a search on 11954 - plenty of good caches out there on the Paumanok trail. -PD

NY has had a COP monument / cache for at least a year now. Momma duck and I visited it while we were in the Port Jervis / Monticello area last summer. -PD

To try and re-assure Johnny's claims, stoke the flames a bit more and maybe just get everyone to chill, Poppa has to comment. Yes - I was caching that weekend at about the same time on southern LI. I was caching further east (Montauk to be specific) and no I did not have any reception problems. Hang on folks - here comes the tongue and cheek part and the message to chill out. I was out by Camp Hero - the abandoned army base turned state park. The base that supposedly delved into mind experiments, alien life forms, and all sorts of other weird things. The base that still supposedly receives enough power to energize a small city even though it's abandoned. The base with the abandoned radar tower that mysertiously rotates at night. If anyone's GPS should have been zapped it should have been mine, and yet I had no trouble. My point - it happened - no need for anyone to call names here and take an attitude. Case closed -PD

Regarding the multi that continues to grow by Team AlphaOmega. Poppa tried placing one (and called it a build-a-cache) and the admin's denied it. The issue was that they wanted to make sure the stages were placed safely (ie: no train tracks, military bases, etc) and far enough from other caches. I thought it was a great idea, but their arguments made sense. (but that never stopped anybody from putting the coordinates for an unlisted bonus cache or two in an existing cache...) -PD

Way to go Stayfloopy - and to think I had the honor to meet up with him right after he logged #3999 (too bad it wasn't #4K that I met up with him on). -PD

Welcome to the century club. Congrats. -PD

I'll second the thought that I'm glad everyone came out of this alright. I personally don't cache armed, but that being said I do always have something that can in some way be used for offense or defense (sounds cryptic, but it could be anything eg: a loaded backpack can be used to deflect a blow and even thrown/swung to take an attacker off balance giving you a chance to escape). Another practice when we go out on a family hike / cache is that we take one of our dogs with us. None of them have been attack trained, but they have bonded deeply with us (the kids especially) - kind of goes along the same lines of a grizzly protecting her kids. They're both a deterrent and a I have no doubts that they'd fight to the death to protect the kids. -PD

Geo Cats - it depends how young the kids are. For the younger kids - At one caching event we went to they set up individual take home mini-caches for the kids (disposable gladware containers, candy, party favor type toys, etc). Each kid was given a hint sheet and got to keep the cache when they found it. Went over great with my 6 year old. For the older kids - I ran a cub scout geocache program once. I followed the above for the younger scouts, but for the older ones I combined a mini gps based hunt with a mini-orienteering hunt. At the end of each stage they boys were allowed to pick something from the cache. One stage had simple items (pencils, erasers, flag pins), while the second had better items (baseball caps, mini-flashlights, etc). Actually for the scouting event we didn't have to buy anything - the local businesses (phone company, power company, newspapers, etc) all donated the items. -PD

(and both my centennial and bi-centennial finds where cemetary caches - I see a pettern developing).... -PD

I found a Listerine pocket pack cache once. it was tucked into a crevice under an old stone bridge. It did stay nice and dry, but it was tough to get the log out. Thinking in real time here, a better use would be as a stage in a multi. The sole contents would be a laminated set of coordinates or maybe a dog tag with coordinates. -PD

I use a Dell Axim 30 in a Rhinoskin case while on the road. The unit costs in the $500 range with the built-in wi-fi. On Long Island I've found that a majority of the public libraries have free wi-fi access. Also in Manhattan, you'll find that most of the larger public parks (Union Square, Madison Square, parts of Central Park) have freely accessible public access. In general if you find a wireless spot with the default name (ie: netgear or linksys) it used to mean that the owner was leaving it open for public access. -PD

Congrats Joe !!! -PD

I did a geocaching night for my son's cub pack. Went over the basics of caching and how a GPS works inside and then went 'caching' for several small stashes I placed on the school property for the night. At our next picnic, the cubmaster and several of the boys went with me for several of the local caches. We ended up placing one too (Cub Pack 66). Nice thing about placing it was that quite a few scouting related patches have passed through it. Now that my older son has bridged to a boy scout troop and my younger one is in the cub pack, I've been asked to do it again. -Poppa Duck

Way to go Z !!!!!! -Poppa Duck

Way to go Joe - congrats !!!! -PD

I'd say do a search on zip 10003 (that's about the Union Square/ Washington Square area - below 23rd street) and look north. I've had the most fun doing the Central Park caches - they're a bit north of that zip code (which is why I say look north) and you can do most if not all in a day. Enjoy the weekend... -Poppa Duck