Entering Bad Coord's, How Far Did You Get Before.....

[TygerD]

Ever entered the wrong coord's for a cache. And how far did you get before you realized something wasn't right.

 

I'm afraid to admit it happened to me today. It only cost me a 2 mile trip around the block. Later, on another I entered the cord's to a parking area, and spent 5 minutes looking for the cache, before I realized I hadn't entered the coord's for the actual cache. Oh well it was a nice day

[bogleman]

I have learned to download the .loc file and send it to the GPS, many fudge ups before I beat it into my head that this was the best way to start seeking a cache. Now I only mess them up when I am working a multi in the field - small buttons+big thumbs=fudge-ups. Wow only 30 miles to the next waypoint I better recheck my numbers.

[+Isonzo Karst]

Like bogleman, all my loading is done electronically - except for stage coords.

I spent a tough tough couple of hours trying to get to stage 2 on a cache with a terrain rating that just didn't match the crotch deep in the swamp environment I was finding. Finally gave up, went a couple of miles back to stage one, and yep - misentered coords. Only by 1000 feet, but a critical bit of territory. Stage 2 was about 30 feet off trail, high and dry at the base of the largest oak.

[GeoLizz]

Same thing happened to me with the multi. I entered the final stage's co-ords wrong, but it only left me about 300 ft away. Not too bad.

[vagabond]

I usually download my coords, but if I'm doing just a few like 5 or less I'll hand key them in but I double check the numbers

[+Rick618]

Transposing numbers is something that I am prone to do and on occasion after pointing and clicking on the gpsr the wrong number is in there. Generally not too far but one evening I ended up at a juncture of a couple of driveways that almost matched the 4way description. Further checking of the log page and a map then the numbers and I was only a mile or so off.

[+Team Red Oak]

It happened to us on a multi cache. Someone misread one of the numbers. We walked about a mile one way before we realized something must be wrong. Luckily we were walking on a paved rails to trails path. Unfortunately it was in the summer and on one of the days last year that heated up into a humid scorcher here in Maryland.

[rocketmann]

I've entered wrong coords once or twice before. USually dont figure that out until I get back home and try to figure out where I screwed up.I alsways double check the coords when I put them into m GPS too.

[+GPSOkie]

I had a puzzle cache go bad about a month ago. I think we ended up about 17 miles south of where we were supposed to be. We never did figure it out. After spending the first 3 hours of our day and no find, we moved on to other caches. We WILL go back and figure it out someday, though !

[+RoyalRed]

The first cache i had to log a DNF ended up costing me three trips and countless hours of searching in vain. Even went after it one day in the Fal when hurricane Ivan was hammering eastern PA. Was only a few months later when I took some other Geocachers with me that I found out I had the wrong coords plugged in. Felt like a total idiot!

[+The Herd]

There is always this log from the "Project Ape" Cache in Chicago. I still laugh when I read it!!

 

"May 29, 2005 by Team CoyChev (1906 found)

We had a long weekend with nothing planned, so, of course, we thought, "APE CACHE"! There's nothing we like better than a long drive with cops everywhere and yellow barrels to guide our way, so we packed up the mobile refrigerator, an overnight bag (just in case we wanted to spend the night away from home) and our caching gear, and headed to Indiana; yep, you read that right; Indiana. That's where we thought the ape cache was. Caching paperless is great, but we had no pocket queries outside of Michigan, so Gary entered the coords by hand, but Donna wanted the cache page, so it was printed out for her. With the wrong coords entered into Mapsource and the Garmin, it appeared that Mission 12: Blind Canal was just 210 miles from Roseville, in Indiana. We both said, "I thought the ape cache is in Illinios?" Well, it IS!

So off we go. Sixty miles down the road, while passing through Ann Arbor, we decide to stop at victorymike's, say "HI", and see if he wants to go ape with us. "Heck, yeah!" he says, so we head toward northern Indiana, caching a little along the way.

 

We finally get to the coords, travel completely around a huge cornfield, and see no way of getting to the cache, which is supposedly in the middle of the field. We decide to re-check the coords with the cache page that Donna has with her, and YEP!, the west coords are way off! The correct coords show that we're 102 miles away, as the crow flies, in Indiana, from the ape cache, in ILLINOIS!!

 

We enter the correct coords into the 3, count them, 3 GPSr's, and head toward Illinois, on low speed-limit highways (What's up with that!)."

 

just an f.y.i. They did go get the cache that day!!

[+JohnnyVegas]

Like others I now load coordinates into my gps from my computer. But I do tend to enter the wrong numbers once in a while when doing a Multi. Now when I do a multi when I find to coordinates for the next coordinates I photograph them with my Dig. camera so I do not have to go back to the previous stage to see if I made a mistake

[+vree]

the best story i've seen is this one. they ended up in the wrong state... heh.

 

the worst i've done, personally, was entering a wrong digit when trying to locate an access road. we knew something wasn't right, but we ended up finding the right road after all was said and done. it threw us off about 20 minutes or so...

[+BBWolf+3Pigs]

On an early cache, I had manually entered some waypoints into my etrex yellow, with a short (cryptic) title. I then selected (what I thought was the correct) label, and off I went (should have been a short hike). With .5 miles to go, I ran out of room in the park! But I knew the cache was in the little bit of green space I was standing in.

 

I thought for a second, and then realized I had selected the wrong cache name! Once I selected the right one, I had 0' to go (cache was at my feet)! Seems the second cache was in a direct line from the cache I was at in the direction i was walking!

[+Miragee]

I did a Multi one time where one of the waypoints was a round disk. Only the last three numbers for the next stage were written on the disk.

 

My caching partner read them off as:

 

210

908

 

So, off we went. After walking to an area that couldn't possibly be where the final cache was, we went back to the waypoint.

 

You were supposed to turn the disk to read the numbers correctly. They were actually:

 

210

806

 

[+sbell111]

Its happened to me a few times before. The first time, I was going after a FTF on a cache that was placed by a noob and had a couple of DNFs from very experienced cachers. I got to ground zero and couldn't find it. I reread the cache page and it described a location a couple of hundred feet away. A short search turned up the cache.

 

The second time was on a cache that was placed by a very experienced cacher for an event. It wasn't listed on GC.com until after the event. Once it was listed, all the event finders logged it online. Later, I searched for it and came up empty. The cache name reminded me of a feature at the entrance to the park two miles away. A short drive and a brief search resulted in the find.

 

Then there was the time that I went after a multi by the same cacher. It required you to find three locations with a long walk in between. It had been raining and the area was very muddy. I found location one and slogged to the next location. Nothing. I looked and looked but came up empty. I walked back to spot one and found that I wrote the coords down wrong. I had to walk all the way past where I had originally thought spot two was to find the 'real' second step. Doh!

 

Of course, then there's the hundreds of DNFs that I've logged. I'm sure that those caches were not at the listed coords.

Edited March 21, 2006 by sbell111

[+boda]

First time caching on our own and we went out to find 3 caches. First I entered the wrong coordinates for a micro cache. While searching at the wrong location we found a large cache placed by another cacher. We were really confused because we were new and nothing made sense. Oh well, we signed the log and then went to find a brand new cache.

We double checked the coordinates and we searched the area and had no luck. The description in the cache page didn't match the area we were in. Turns out that the cache owner had entered the coordinates incorrectly. We were where the coordinates said, but not where the cache was. BTW the cache owner was the same person who placed the cache we found by mistake.

The third cache we went to that day was in a park. My GPSr was set to "Follow road" and so as we walked toward the cache, the compass pointed me back to the road and that really confused us. We have improved our caching skills over time, I hope. Downloading the coordinates and using a PDA help.

I don't know how far off we were, but we sure wandered around in the wrong areas a lot that day.

[+rnlorna]

Twice now, I have solved mystery cache puzzles that clearly stated "The cache is not at the posted coordinates." I solved the puzzle, wrote down the correct coords and went out caching. I forgot to input the corrected coords into the GPSr and wound up wandering around pricker bushes for a while before remembering (and hitting myself in the forehead) that I have a set of coords that will actually work! Once I started following the correct coords, it was much easier to find the cache!

You'd think I would have learned after the first time....