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I destroyed a brand new cache today


sTeamTraen

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Reaching round some metal bars feeling for a magnetic micro, the outside of my hand brushed against the film canister. It detached itself from the bar, fell, and disappeared into the - very securely locked - abandoned building.

 

Yep, this one "Needs Maintenance". And all because of little me. :blink:

 

Still, at least I 'fessed up to the owner. Looks like I'll have one less coin to sell (when they arrive). :laughing:

 

Anyone else accidentally destroyed a cache?

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Reaching round some metal bars feeling for a magnetic micro, the outside of my hand brushed against the film canister. It detached itself from the bar, fell, and disappeared into the - very securely locked - abandoned building.

 

Yep, this one "Needs Maintenance". And all because of little me. :blink:

 

Still, at least I 'fessed up to the owner. Looks like I'll have one less coin to sell (when they arrive). :laughing:

 

Anyone else accidentally destroyed a cache?

 

Hider should have known that could happen. Not your fault. Still haven't destroyed one myself yet, but, I'm still pretty knew. Maybe someday.

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Did the right thing by telling the owner. If you didn't say anything, half a dozen other cachers would have went for it before it was noticed as missing.

 

I have not destroyed any caches, but I have ripped and crumbled log books. It can be very difficult rolling up that "log" and replacing it back into that bison tube or nano container. But I have always said something to the owner. And thats just part of being a cache owner.

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Yes, I have destroyed a cache. Well, my friend did it actually. We were snow caching and my friend stepped on the cache and cracked the container. While it was one of our easier finds, I felt terrible. We packed all of the contents in ziplock bags and I emailed the owner offering to replace the container on a subsequent trip. He graciously declined my offer, told me not to sweat it and replaced it himself.

 

It's not quite as horrifying as completely losing the cache, but it still bothered me.

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Oh yes, a fairly new cache was destroyed when I went to replace the 20 pound rock

that was covering the cache. It split the lock-and-lock lid right down the middle.

The next hider replaced it with an ammo box. They lived in the area of the cache

and came back the next day to replace it. I think all has been forgiven...

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We were FTF on a cache and it was up in a tree suspended in the air you had to untie the rope and lower the ammo can then hoist it back up. Well we got done signing it and were pulling the rope to get the ammo can up and then SNAP it breaks and the ammo can crashes down!

 

We felt bad. We wrote the owner and offered to go out the next day with a new rope and fix it but he said he would take care of it.

 

Another one was a MKB and as we opened it the lid popped off! We were headed to an event and we knew the owner would be there so we told him what happened.

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"Integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is looking."

 

I broke somone else's container once.

 

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LU...93-2de024486000

 

I visited the cache at 0605 hrs, to bag the Green Jeep. Unfortunately, I get the dubious distinction of being the first person to "break the fish." As I was recovering the "fish," he came off the hook and dove head first, back into his pond. The fish managed to shatter his skull, and I was able to carefully retrieve him. He is is no shape to be recovered again, until he gets surgery.

Marty,

 

I have your "fish" in my car, call me later, and i'll help you fix him, after I get off work.

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This has happened to me so many times I should start a bookmark list of caches I have accidently lost or damaged.

 

you too?

 

I constantly (well...more often than I would like to admit) end up managing to lose, destroy, or not quite "catch" a cache. (don't ask)

 

I'm very glad I am not the only one.

Edited by 4leafclover
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My sister-in-law broke a key holder the first time we took her out caching. I didn't have another one with me, but we were parked by a drugstore, so we walked there, bought a new key holder, walked back to the cache and replaced the key holder.

 

I thought about not telling the owner just to see if he said anything about finding a different key holder the next time he went out to do maintenence, but I decided that I really ought to 'fess up ahead of time.

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Too new to destroy a cache but did have my dog destroy a travel bug. Rubik's Cube with the co-ordinates to the final cache. I was home and loging the find and he, the 9 month old exuberant puppy, stole it off the desk and it was in pieces before I realized it was gone. Contacted the owner but yet to hear back on replacement.

 

matt

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Anyone else accidentally destroyed a cache?

Not me personally. But I know a guy that dropped a cache from a pier into the ocean, and it sank. He fessed up.

 

When I was a kid, and I dropped a Magic 8 Ball onto the linoleum floor in the toy department at Woolworths. There was an awful crunching sound followed by a huge, black, inky mess. Cost me a weeks allowance. I'm certain that that painful experience taught be to be careful around geocaches.

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I managed to drop one down into the hollow of a tree when I was replacing it; I tried fishing it out with everything that I had in the car, then Deputyhound came out to assist, with his longer reach. No dice. I could see the little critter wedged down in the bottom of the tree, but it wasn't coming out. Notified the cache owner, and he couldn't extricate it, either. The poor cache was archived. I felt really bad about that.

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...my hand brushed against the film canister. It detached itself from the bar, fell, and disappeared into the - very securely locked - abandoned building.

You're in luck! Those containers are easily replaced, and they almost never have swag or travel bugs. That would have been much worse, losing a TB.

 

Never destroyed a cache, but wrecked the hiding spot once. It was in a rotted tree that was hanging over a hill, and after taking out the cahce I leaned a little too hard on the tree... :laughing:

 

That tree just needed to go. Who knows? You may have saved the life of some future cacher.

 

We were FTF on a cache and it was up in a tree suspended in the air you had to untie the rope and lower the ammo can then hoist it back up. Well we got done signing it and were pulling the rope to get the ammo can up and then SNAP it breaks and the ammo can crashes down!

 

That's what first finders are good for. Find the bugs so that they can be fixed for everyone else. If the string was so weak that it broke on the first find, then that's just a design error. At least it didn't fall on anyone. An ammo can? Ouch!

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We've demolished number of hide-a-keys. I won't hardly hunt them anymore. The magnets come off, the lids lose the lip and fall away, the metal ones get too rusty to function and the plastic ones get stiff crumbly and full of sand. I refuse to acknowledge that their deaths have anything to do with my hammer technique for opening them. (

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I was looking for one of those magnetic nano things about half the size of a thimble. I swept along the top of a metal bar with my hand and I felt it go flying -- right into a patch of 6 inch deep snow covered ivy. Yeah... it was gone. I posted a note to the page telling of my clumsiness and the owner replaced it the next morning.

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Reaching round some metal bars feeling for a magnetic micro, the outside of my hand brushed against the film canister. It detached itself from the bar, fell, and disappeared into the - very securely locked - abandoned building.

 

Yep, this one "Needs Maintenance". And all because of little me. :)

 

Still, at least I 'fessed up to the owner. Looks like I'll have one less coin to sell (when they arrive). :D

 

Anyone else accidentally destroyed a cache?

 

Yes.

 

I was standing by canal back, looking at dead animals, a couch cushion, a rotting stump and other debris and scratching my head. I read the clue. "Magnetic keyholder" cool Some of the concrete debris had rebar and there was a handy guard rail nearby. I found the wasps but no cache.

 

Later I came back with my kids and had no better luck. Annoyed I decided it was a good time to move the rotten stump and grabbed it. It blew apart into pieces and the cache was revealed. Yup, a magnetic keyholder all right.

 

Hmmm...I've also crushed a film canister with the rock it was hidden under.

Edited by Renegade Knight
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I broke an already broken cache a few weeks ago. It was a vial glued to the bottom of a spike. Apparently the glass vial had already been broken by a previous cacher and all I could see was the lid, which I attempted to unscrew from the spike. No good.

 

I seem to remember a story a few years ago on the forums where someone dropped a cache down into an area they couldn't retrieve it. They went to a Radio Shack and bought a remote control car and tried sending it after the cache. Any other old timers remember that story?

 

Bret

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Lets see - where to start.....

 

Broke a glass mason jar on one of my first 30 or so caches.

 

Broke the lid on a tupperware container in really cold weather.

 

Dropped one off of an old bridge into the river below.

 

Broke a rusty hinge clear off an ammo box.

 

Lost logsheet into the wind on 2 different log only micros.

 

I have learned to carry a variety of "tools" and misc with me to make things right. Plus sorrowful emails to the owners.

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I managed to drop one down into the hollow of a tree when I was replacing it; I tried fishing it out with everything that I had in the car, then Deputyhound came out to assist, with his longer reach. No dice. I could see the little critter wedged down in the bottom of the tree, but it wasn't coming out. Notified the cache owner, and he couldn't extricate it, either. The poor cache was archived. I felt really bad about that.

Ha! That was my cache! :D A while back a new cache appeared in that same cemetery so I checked the old hiding spot and my container was gone. I guess someone figured out how to remove the container. :)

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I dropped a Bison tube cache down into a hollow metal fence post one time. Felt really bad about it and emailed the owner but they were cool about it. Stuff happens!

 

Heh...I did that once too, but it was a pill bottle. The kicker was that a newbie had just replaced the cache for the owner the day before! I still don't know what I was thinking trying to balance it on the side of the pipe! UGH

 

I managed to save the logsheet and replaced the cache with a film canister CITO kit I had in the truck. Ugh...I dreaded writing that log!

 

Bret

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Dropped a new cache from about 6' up, in to a hollow tree which looked like it had a pretty secure bottom, but the cache kept on falling down to the base. So somewhere out there in South Texas (I don't even remember which park...Pedernales Falls? Inks Lake?) is a brand new cache that I never got to activate.

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