Bear_Left

The Who "Cache, Cache" from the Face Dances album I don't like the chorus, though... "There ain't no bears in there (cache cache) Not a single bear in there (cache cache)"

It's happened to us quite a few times, including one pleasant encounter with a cache's owner while I was in Arizona (a long way from my then home in New Zealand!) Most have been at new caches, with other keen FTF attempters, but sometimes it's been at less likely sites. We usually make sure that one of our GPSrs is visible, to avoid the awkwardness of approaching a Muggle by mistake. A local newbie cacher _thought_ he'd met a fellow cacher when he asked the man hanging around the bushes in a park if "he was there for the same reason", but was heading into the shrubbery when the "other cacher" asked him what that device he was carrying was for!

I had (and, against all experience, continue to have) great expectations of losing weight because of all the caches that are at the top of hills. Hasn't happened yet, but. Currently 183cm and 115kg, which means that I'm about 30cm undertall.

Maybe that could be: The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have geocaches to seek, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep. Not a perfect rhyme, but it scans better!

I haven't so much as glanced at a TV for a couple of years, but this might be worth checking a Torrent site for...

We enjoy being FTF, but only if there's another cacher on our heels. Petty? Over competitive? Small-souled? Why, yes. Yes we are. There's much less satisfaction if the next log's a week later. Nobody tearing their hair out over our 1am log in the book that they found at 5am! We've got sneaky, too. We have some nice signature items that we place in caches when we a) like the cache and are FTF. It almost makes it worth waiting a while for us to find the cache and leave the goodies! (Mostly tongue in cheek. FTF does add a bit of a thrill, but we'd rather be the fifteenth to find a good cache than the first to find a mediocre one.)

Like many others, I suspect, I didn't know or care whether the software listed here was freeware, shareware or commercial. The main point was that I assumed that they had all passed some sort of peer review and were considered useful programs by the community. GSAK was listed because so many people had stumbled across it and loved it, it became a service to the rest to bring it to their attention. I paid for GSAK the day ClydE announced that he was changing the status of it, because I'm happy to support good software and services. Same reason I became a Premium member very soon after taking up geocaching. Please don't deny new cachers the chance to discover such useful and well-supported software that so enhances the caching experience, just because the author wants to get a reward for his considerable investment in time and energy!

The trouble with most of the 'night caches' that I've done or seen listed is that they're really just "follow the light" exercises. You need a GPS to find the first one, then to find your way back to your car, but that's all. There are several other ideas for _real_ night caches, and they've been covered in older threads.

In pre-mapping-GPS/Palm/laptop days, we spent far too much time driving around trying to find the right approach to the next waypoint of a multi. Life is now better and we spend more time looking for caches than looking for streets.

For serious cache-hunting, there's "The Illuminator" (Austrian accent required), a rechargeable spotlight that lives in the car until needed. It's great for crisping concealing foliage and finding plastic boxes. Just play it around the general area and keep sniffing for the smell of melting PVC... In the cachebag I have a halogen-bulb headlamp that's mostly useful because it's bright enough to use a wide-angle beam when approaching the cache (to see side-paths and general terrain) and to give a seriously bright spotlight for looking long distances or bringing up that gleam of plastic amongst the undergrowth. A small 7-LED, 3xAAA torch is normally enough for general hiking, as it'll last for 24+ hours compared to the hour or two for the headlamp. For ad-hoc or fiddly work, I have one of those insanely bright single-LED keyring lights... on my keyring. I bought a job lot of them and attached stickers to make one of our signature items, too. They don't usually stay in a cache long!

I used to be into bestiality, necrophilia and sadomasochism, but then I realised that I was just beating a dead horse...

We don't usually leave FTF prizes, although we have on a couple of special caches. One was the culmination of eight other caches placed by other cachers (Happily Ever After, on a Snow White theme) and we had a nice meal for FTF and an outdoor store voucher for STF. Competition was keen! We also offered a Buffy calendar for this themed multi. We have a couple of FTF prizes, but the best ones are specific mementos of the cache rather than something valuable per se. We left behind an anemometer worth a couple of hundred bucks in favour of a second-hand book of poems when we were FTF this mega-cache. (26 waypoints! A-Z of Sydney suburbs!) So, go for something hand-crafted or labeled appropriately for the cache. Cash or vouchers are nice, but get forgotten too soon.

This article goes into a fair bit of detail on how to put GPX contents onto your Palm. There are simpler ways, and there's another article on the same site details one of them. These should get you out in the Great Outdoors with cache info at your fingertips in no time!

The most important requirement for a camera is for it to be there when you want it! I have a small, cheap no-name 3megapixel camera that takes OK photos, but some of them have been much better than the lack-of-photo from my wife's fancier Sony! One thing to consider: if what you're after is basically a camera for snaps of cache locations and events, and if you don't already have a PDA, consider a camera-equipped one to kill two birds with one stone. Things like the Palm Zire72 have a 1.3megapixel camera, and the benefits of paperless caching have been oft-discussed here. Put it in a good hardcase and you've got yourself a good multi-purpose tool. Not a state-of-the-art camera by any stretch, but since your PDA will become indispensable, you'll always have it with you!

It's not essentially different to the caches that are almost a drive-up if you have a serious 4WD but a fair hike if you have to park at the end of the road and walk. It just changes the level of fitness required to reach a given cache, and that's already a pretty big variable! There are caches that have been a serious afternoon's huff'n'puff for me that others just _ran_ to!

We must admit to suffering from GAS... Geocaching Addiction Syndrome It means that walks through parks and bushland invariably involve looking into likely-looking treestumps and rocks for cache hidey-holes. We rarely re-visit an area of this lovely land (South Island of New Zealand) until and unless there's a local cacher there who's placed new caches for us to find since our last visit. The staff at the local 'cheapie' shops know us by name. We have more plastic boxes than the local Tupperware warehouse. Better ones, too. Many of them pre-camoed. A fairly local lat and long is almost as recognisable as a suburb or town name. I'm about to fly to Australia to visit Mum for her 80th birthday. She gets about equal time with cache-hunting... For me, caching isn't a life-or-death matter. It's much more important than that!

I can see an explosive growth in local webcam caches...

What? No grey areas? No special circumstances, ever?! If the point of the cache is finding GZ from puzzles, earlier waypoints, or spotting the clever hiding place, then finding the spot where the logbook _should_ have been would be a find for me, certainly as cache-owner and hopefully as finder. If it's a traditional box-under-a-bush, then it's a dadgum shame if it's gone, but just walking to the spot where the GPS says "0 metres" doesn't constitute a find. In addition, I've placed caches where the logbook is locked and needs a combination to open and sign it. This is similar to the birdhouse mentioned above, and I'd not allow a find for anyone who only found the GZ without also solving the problem of access to the logbook.

I don't see much use for the etymology lesson in the last block. The stuff about computer memory and provisions isn't of any particular use to a muggle who's come across this box under a rock, even in terms of education to make them less likely to trash it. The "is" in the first sentence of this block should be "are" The bit with "the only rules are" is getting a little out of date these days! Why not change all those general "in a cache" statements with "in this cache" instead? It's this cache that the Muggle's found, after all, and it's right there in front of him/her! This note isn't aimed at cachers (when was the last time you read one in a cache you'd found?!), so you should aim it at the intended audience. In general, it's a bit big. If you have to fold it up too much to fit in in an average lunchbox-sized container, it becomes less eye-catching. Apart from that, I love it!

A good one, but hardly unique... I had one of these on the back of a locked logbook, with the combination of the lock. Really annoyed one team who just can't see these SIRS! At least with this one, if you can't do them, you don't need to get to the end of a multi before needing to!

Some local wit left a dead seagull in this New Zealand cache...

A model with a memory card option (SD cards in the case of Palms) is recommended, as the files involved with carrying lots of caches can get quite big and take a long time to Hotsync to an older, serial interface model. I can see some value in having a cheap second-hand Palm for caching, keeping your expensive 'external brain' out of harm's way when you're out bashing through bushes and streams! Personally, I'd recommend getting a fairly high-end one (like a Zire 71/72 or a Tungsten T2/3/5/E) and a good hardcase for it, so that you can use it for all the myriad day-to-day uses of a Palm as well as geocaching. If you use it for everything, you'll always carry it. If you're always carrying it, you'll use it for everything! I think the Zire 72 might be the ideal device. The 1.3megapixel camera's good enough for most cache-snaps, it has a great 320x320 screen that you can see in the dark and in bright sunshine, it's fast enough to search large files in iSilo, Mobipocket, etc., it has Bluetooth to let you use a BT GPSr with it, and you can use the voice recorder to take audio notes of your impressions and swaps for later transcription. Oh, and apparently you can keep addresses and appointments on it...

Most of the locals hold their discussions on the local forum at GPS.org.nz so, if you need some local knowlege, that's the place to look. There's also stats, including recommended caches, on the Australian caching site.

We have a couple of little items that we place when a cache has really impressed us, or for most of our FTFs (unless they're really lame!) The main one is a multifunction card: and we also leave some little LED torches (and aren't these suckers getting BRIGHT?!) I used one of these to navigate my way back to the car when I stayed out getting that one.... last... waypoint until it was quite dark!

I've just been playing with what I'm calling DGPSoIP (Differential GPS over Internet Protocol), and is usually referred to as NTRIP (Networked Transport of RTCM via Internet Protocol) I placed a couple of caches here in Christchurch, New Zealand last weekend, with a couple of spots that were under tree cover and giving me an EPE of 18-20m (convert that to mediaeval measurements yourself!) I hooked up the eTrex to an IBM laptop and logged onto my ISP via IRdA to a GSM phone (aren't these acronyms wonderful?), then watched as the satellite bars all started sprouting "D"s and the EPE went down to 3m! In clearer areas, where I was getting the usual 'good' EPE of 5-6m (no WAAS down under...), I improved it to 1m. It's too cumbersome for cache finding (but with a Palm client instead of the laptop...) but wonderful for setting caches, especially under cover.