Bear_Left

One of New Zealand's early cachers established a reputation for placing large containers, and most of them are still around. His method of hiding them was to put them in places where nobody who _wasn't_ following a little GPSr arrow would dream of going. We've scratched our heads a couple of times, wondering why this 20 litre white bucket was still sitting undisturbed with nothing more than a bit of bush to hide it! In fact, I've heard local cachers call any large container "a Donovan" in his honour!

Just an observation: there's a 3-cache series (Hunt for Pilatus) in Sydney, Australia that had a waypoint in 26 suburbs (Abbotsford, Bondi, Clovelly...... Zetland) that took us a couple of weekends to work through. Many innovative waypoint ideas but very high maintenance (we were FTF and _we_ found some lost waypoints!) So, it can be done!

While I'm quite happy to use lat/lon for caching purposes, the main advantage to me of having some familiarity with UTM was that I could use it to look up the rough address os a waypoint using my standard street directory (map book / A-Z / whatever you call it where you live!) This has been somewhat superceded by laptops and maps on my Palm PDA, but it got us to the general vicinity of several waypoints of multicaches in the past!

We've been a bit spoiled Down Under, I must say. In both Australia and New Zealand, I've often had caches approved within the hour, sometimes with an email to clarify or correct some point (so I know it's not just an auto-approval script!) It helps that it's a small community, so they usually know the placers, even if only by reputation.

When we (wife and I) were introduced to caching, I wanted some name that tied in with my totem animal and obsession; Polar Bears. Paranosmia being what it is, Bear_Left was quickly chosen... We quickly became Mama Bear_Left and Papa Bear_Left (PBL on the local NZ forums, often as not) and the kids became Baby Bear and Babiest Bear on the occasions when they join us on a cache-hunt. I try to have some sort of polar bear related picture as a background to all our caches, as well as on the logbook cover. This sometimes takes longer than the rest of the cache! -PBL

Too true. There was a MacGyver-themed cache in Sydney, Australia that had a micro-based box with a keypad and an LCD that delivered a "enter the number or the hostage gets it" countdown. Great fun (with a typical McGyver solution to it) but it got flooded out in freakish rains once, then the replacement went missing. The cache-setter lost heart after that, not surprisingly. (The first one gets made from the junkbox but replacements cost 'new money'!) If I was to devote a solar-powered PC and a wi-fi router to a cache, I'd want to be dadgum sure that it was secure!

Wow! What are the odds of this: I'm reading this forum because I'm heading to Arizona in a couple of days, and I'm also half of the team that were FTF this very cache! It was quite intense and there was a bit of skullduggery going on (most of it ours, actually!) and many late-night dashes to nab a coveted Element. Some thoughts: modern inkjet inks are usually spirit-based and water-resistant, and the laminating should protect them anyway. When did you last see a water-damaged laminated card? Make the requirement to stay in the area LARGE PRINT and prominent. If someone goes to all the effort of finding each of the TBs and then steals all the contents, you'll know who it is if they've been logging their TB finds. It seems unlikely that anyone would go to that much effort... Bear in mind that the pace of finding slackened off sharply once the 'serious competitors' found the Elements and the cache, so don't overload the cache with goodies as they might be out there awhile. Ask Leek to show you the Winners Page! This was one of our favourite caches, and it won a local award for the setter (the wrong one, really, as he says right in the description that it was inspired by another cache!) If your locals have as much fun with it as we did, it'll have been worth the setup!

I use our site bearleft.mackereth.net for some general stuff, but mainly for additional information on some caches that won't easily fit on the main cache listing. There's also some hidden pages for cachers who've finished some of our more involved caches, so they can see how they were made, who else has finished and their stories, etc.

Umm... the solar garden light is a good idea (but I would say that; I bought several of them yesterday for exactly this purpose!) but why use an IR LED? I mean, the whole point of _infra_ red is that it's invisible... Once you add a small microcontroller to the mix, the possibilities start to open up. You can now get little 8-pin MCUs for a couple of bucks, and they'll run on a couple of AAA alkalines for months or years, if the application is written the right way. Ideas in my 'to do' list: -variations on the night cache flashing LED idea, including a simple 'flash only at night', Morse or prisoner's code continuous flasher, torch-flash-activated flasher, etc. -solar powered radio transmitter (using the garden lights!) that uses about 32k of MCU flash to store some digitised speech with coords. Aimed at a night cache initially, but it doesn't need to be. The output would be so tiny that it could run off the batteries full-time and they'd still charge every time the sun shone. (The cache description would specify a frequency. Oh, and the requirement for an FM radio!) -if solar power's not an option, an alternative to keep the power down is to have the MCU sleep and wake up once a second to do a quick radio 'beep' and only do the full coords every minute or two. The beep allows the radio to be tuned but takes much less total power than continuous transmitting. This should run for a year or two on a couple of good AAs. -holes bored in posts, etc. that take laser pointers (from a nearby cached box) whose beams cross at a point that has a micro with the next waypoint (or just a log if you don't want a 'real' cache!) One of those pop-up sprinkler housings seems like a good bet, given that the area with the crossed beams needs to be open. Should look great in fog! The laser pointers will either need to be pulsed to reduce current drain or be recharged in their cache box, maybe by solar. (Thanks to GSVnofixedabode for brainstorming this one with me!) -A continuously beaming 'business card' that can be received by a PDA or IR-enabled mobile phone or laptop, with the next coords etc in it. A power supply and a secure location required for the transmitter! (I'm using an old Palm I picked up cheap. And an MCU to 'press' the transmit button and then reset it, cos I can't write the code to do it on the Palm!) -A 'moving-message' display in a window with the next coords scrolling across it. (I have one ready to go, but I want it to be a night-only cache so I still need to modify it to only work when it's dark. I'll have it in the upstairs window of my employer's office building.) There are others in my memopad, but these might get some tech-heads' creative juices flowing. I'd love to hear of caches that use any of these ideas! Rgds, Ian (Bearded part of Bear_Left) Christchurch, NZ

One of the advantages of living in a relatively cache-poor part of the world is that I can fit all of the caches on the South Island of New Zealand in one PQ, so they're all on our Palms and our GPSrs, updated pretty regularly. (GSAK now has a command-line option, so it's become an automated process.) We usually pick a direction and head off for a drive toward some 'special' cache, and pick up whatever's on the way. Now that we've done most of the dense caches in and near our home city (Christchurch), cache-hunts become more of a day or weekend trip than an afternoon's activity. We've also discovered exactly how many caches we like to do in a day: just one more!

One method of cache-hunting that I've thought of but never tried: If you're not in an urban or too-open place, watch your GPSr and, when the arrow moves and the distance changes, it means that the cache must be moving. I mean, the arrow points to the cache, right? Listen really carefully and pounce on the cache as it rustles through the bushes! Let us know how well this method works...

Try this link (BaldEd had an extra "http://" in there) This is a very step-by-step procedure rather than an overview, and was basically the contents of a few emails to someone in a similar position to you, pamarler. Nobody's born knowing this stuff!

We've been lucky so far; a couple of Muggles to tell various stories to, but only one recent brush with the law. The log: Haven't been back to that one yet, and neither has anyone else! Mind you, it's winter here in Christchurch, NZ and not really ideal river-wading weather...

There was one cache series in Sydney, Australia that had 26 waypoints (each in a suburb starting with the next letter of the alphabet; took us until about 'E' to notice that!), each with a code or puzzle to solve to reach the next. There was Morse code, signal flags, a radio station to listen to, multiple ciphers, and literary references, as well as some cunningly hidden micros. None of them were especially difficult, but the sheer volume was impressive! Unfortunately, many of the waypoints are being compromised and it might not survive. One of mine you can try at home: this cache is probably a little out of the way for most of you to actually find, but if you think you know the solution, let me know at bearleft@mackereth.net Local cachers who just went to the coords in the standard manner ended up in a flat, grassed dog exercise area in a park, with no features for 20m. And it's not buried, of course; that'd be against the rules!

I 'scale' the usefulness of the hint depending on the placement of the cache. If it's in an urban park, then keeping it obscure is defensible as the cacher will probably be able to think about and return if required. If it's a long hike up a steep path in a remote area, then the clue had better be more of a giveaway! (Especially because we're a small community and most local cachers know where I live!) The problem is generally that I don't want to just give away the location to the cachers who consider the hint to be just part of the description, rather than a last resort. There's also the issue of puzzle and multi caches, where someone might want part of the clue but not all of them. It was easy in the days of paper printouts and manual decoding, but what backward places still have that sort of cacher? I have seen hints with the second part further encoded in something simple like ROT1, which seems like a fair compromise. If I do include a giveaway hint, I state that it is such in the hint itself, using the brackets.

There's local maps for Handmap available from www.mapping.co.nz

I used one of these on the back of the logbook in a (now archived) cache I placed last year. It had a three digit number (a bit easier to see than these fine-scale ones!) that was the combination to the lock holding the logbook closed. The "magic eye" and the lock sort of fitted the "Warlock" theme of the cache, y'see... A bit nasty for those people who just can't see them, I guess.

We don't have this car anymore (moved countries since then)

Jealous. Just.... jealous. If we did 130 caches here, we'd've done a third of the total available in the South Island of New Zealand! (Which is about the same size as Illinois) Better buy some plastic boxes and get busy to catch up...

G'Day I'm heading out of a Christchurch, New Zealand winter into an Arizona summer in a couple of weeks, and I'll be driving from Phoenix to Flagstaff for a day or two of touristing before heading back to Scottsdale for a conference. OVER THREE THOUSAND CACHES!?! They won't all fit in one Pocket Query and they sure won't fit in my Magellan all at once! (There's only 756 in all of New Zealand!) So, does anyone have a GPX of all the caches in Az that they could send me? I could use GSAK to cut that down to a managable set, and to generate the details of caches for my Palm. Also, what are my options for GPSr-linked maps? I'll have a WinXP laptop with me, as well as my Palm T3 (with Handmap) and at least a cable for my Meridian. (I may also have bought a Bluetooth GPSr by then...) Anything with a trial period, perhaps? I guess I could use coloured bits of flattened dead tree, but I'd rather have _real_ virtual maps! Anyone up at the Grand Canyon area who'd like to catch up with a Down Under cacher? (I'm at the Flagstaff Howard Johnson's on 17th and 18th July.) I've already arranged to hang with Team Tierra Buena in Scottsdale, and maybe find a cache or two (or just sit and drink cold beer....) I'm originally from the desert in Australia, where 50C (120F) is reached pretty regularly, so I'm hoping old survival mechanisms will come back to me! Ooroo, Ian.

I'll be visiting Scottsdale, Az next month if you can get it that far. I will also be in LA on 17JUL04, but only for about 90 minutes in LAX (world's most boring airport) waiting for a connecting flight to Phoenix. If either of those options is useful to, I'm happy to take it back with me to Christchurch, NZ!

G'Day Here's some details on a recent event cache that had a few manufactured containers. The final waypoint has become a standalone cache, hence it's not pictured, but it's very similar to a couple of the ideas in this thread anyway. For those who never follow links , here's one of the containers: I like camo containers, partly because of the sheer cool factor, but also because it allows a larger container to be used in a muggle-rich environment. Micros have their place, but I try to limit them to waypoints of multis rather than final caches.

You know who you are and what's going on, but we haven't been given any information to reassure us that this isn't a scam. Two simple questions: What's your brother's geocaching name? What cache did he find before the accident? I know it seems insensitive, but haven't you seen emails from or been approached by people with heart-rending stories that turn out to be total fabrications, designed to play on your sympathies? (If you're 13, you may not have yet, but you will, I'm afraid...) You can make all of cynics eat our words with one or two words...

What cache was it he'd done?

A cache in New Zealand had a nasty note from some brats in the logbook, all swaps stolen, and a dead seagull left in the plastic bag with the logbook in the box. a) how gross they bothered to write in the logbook!