First Time Cacher -- Lessons Learned

[vawlk]

Had a great time. 2 down, 7 million to go...

 

Lesson #1

Tree cover = bad. Still found it though, but I was suprised how much the location jumped when under a very light covering of trees.

 

Lesson #2

Body cover - Worse. I'd be holding my GPSr in front of me. When I get to the location I am going to search, I would bend over, blocking the signal with my body. When I didn't find the cache and looked back at the GPSr, I was suddenly 150 ft away!

 

Lesson #3

Wet warnings - Worst. Last cache of the day had a bunch of reports that it could be messy during the wet season, a few muddy reports, the term "marsh" used a few times...etc. And I decide to try it 2 days after 4 inches of rain fell....

 

All in all it was a great time and my 3yr old loved the "Treasure Hunt". Never new he could cover 2+ miles on his bike. What a trooper!

[+clearpath]

Wow ... 4 inches of rain is a lot. Hope you didn't get too muddy. Sounds like you and your 3 yr old are going to have fun with this sport. Good luck with the other 7 million.

[+oscar478]

Welcome aboard vawlk... I too am a newbie, and I found the same thing with my cheap, old GPS... any trees or anything would cause it to jump like crazy... great for exercise, but not good for caching . You can find countless threads out here with different people liking different GPS's. But a few things stand out... newer is typically better. And some of the more expensive ones can easily be many times more accurate than a cheap one.

 

I too "treasure hunt" with my 3 year old. And while she liked it when the GPS worked, she didn't really like tromping around in circles for an hour. So in order to keep a special father/daughter activity going strong, I bought a better GPS (GPSMAP 60c) for about $250 on ebay. It made all the difference in the world... was able to snag several caches quickly this weekend. And she was thrilled with her new "toys".

[vawlk]

I think I have a decent GPSr (Sportrak Color). The other cache we found was completely accurate. When standing next to the cache it registered "1ft". I just wasn't aware that trees would cause that much drift. They covered about 80% of the sky. When I calmed down from the excitement of my first cache, I stood in one place, and the gpsr figured out where it was and led me toward the right direction.

 

My son asked if we could go treasure hunting again this morning so I guess it was well worth the trip!

[+Miragee]

It sounds like you had a great time. Congratulations on your first finds!

 

I cache "paperless," which means I have the cache information in a Palm PDA, which also means I haven't read the cache description, usually, until I arrive on the scene . . .

 

Lesson Learned last Saturday -- after the sun had gone down

 

MUST. LEARN. TO. READ. CACHE. DESRIPTIONS. FIRST.

 

The cache was on a cliff and was rated a '3.5' for difficulty and a '4' for Terrain.

[+Team JSAM]

WeLcOmE... Take the hints with you thats what messed me up in the begining, only a 1 for diff. I dont need no stinking hint.....then went home read hint and logged my DNF....

[+gps_junky]

I have similar prob. with my LEGEND. I read a while back ago that tree cover and internal antena's don't mix too good. Etrex's are great GPS's but with the internal antena not the greatesed for wood's use. If you are going to upgrade, go with a Gps that has an antena (the actual antena on the top, not the chip inside). But if you don't feel like upgrading, keep using your Etrex, Believe me, you will eventually get used to it and be able to find them pritty much as fast as someone with a different moddle..... But I hope that answeres your question.....

[+oscar478]

I think I have a decent GPSr (Sportrak Color). The other cache we found was completely accurate. When standing next to the cache it registered "1ft". I just wasn't aware that trees would cause that much drift. They covered about 80% of the sky. When I calmed down from the excitement of my first cache, I stood in one place, and the gpsr figured out where it was and led me toward the right direction.

 

My son asked if we could go treasure hunting again this morning so I guess it was well worth the trip!

 

Tree cover and other things are a bit of an oddity. It's almost like different trees species or height affect it as well. I've had my GPS is thick cover, where I could barely see the sky, but still have lock on several sats. Other times, open wood might bring me down to a max of 3 or 4, and have more jumping. But here I sit in my lazyboy after downloading a pocket query to my gps, and I have 5 sat feeds coming to me on the ground floor of a 2 story house... go figure.

 

2 other things I've noticed as a newbie... coords can be off for a lot of caches... don't just stop walking once your gps says you're there. But if I find a cache and it's more than 25 or 30 feet away from the published coords, I'll note that in my logs. Then if other people do the same, and 10 people log a cache saying it's off by .005 to the north, then maybe the owner will publish new numbers for everyone.

 

The other thing I've noticed, is once I got a GPS, I placed 2 caches in heavily wooded areas, and both of them have gotten DNF's that the loggers both mentioned jumpy GPS coords. So sometimes having too good of a gps may be a bad thing, and you may be unknowingly excluding some other hunters from the party. But I figure that's their problem

[+Former Hawkeye]

I first keep in mind what I'm looking for (in size) and then has this person placed any other ones I have found-(history sometimes repeats).

Once I get within 40 feet I saw looking at geobeacons. I notice I usually find it quicker than my friend who has a much more expensive gps.

[+WalruZ]

The GPS does not find the cache. You find the cache.