24 Hours In London Leads To New Records

[+Keith Watson]

res2100, Team Goju, geob.o.b., spyddercat, Keith Watson, DoolinBanjos, bggy, Brook22, sabresfan, wizard of oz 11, RockHarder, emzernask, Barnie's Band of Gold, speedy54, greywynd, and Joe Loescher started hitting the caches at 12:00 am on April 9th with a goal of finding 150 caches in a day to set a new record in Ontario. The group started off with an impressive 11 finds per hour and managed to maintain that including DNF’s. At 9:27 am we took a break to welcome the newest members into the Century Club after finding out 100th cache.

 

When 2:28 pm rolled around we were still going strong and hit our goal of 150 caches in only 14 ½ hours, much quicker than we had planned. With the new Ontario record achieved the team kept on rolling. At 8:17 we took another break and took some pictures of the group celebrating our 200th find in one day. Shortly after our 2ooth find, the group started to break up as some of the members wanted to pack it in and go home. A few of us kept on going until midnight and managed to pull off an additional 17 finds giving a grand total of 217 finds in one day.

 

Thanks to all for a great time. I had my doubts we would even make to 150, let alone over 200. A special thanks to the cache placers for placing all those great caches and making the run possible.

 

Some quick stats.

 

217 finds

Over 20 DNF’s

1 stop by police

1 fire extinguisher discharged by accident (never leave to cachers amped up on energy drinks alone in a minivan with a fire extinguisher)

Over 450 km of driving, not including driving to London and back

Best hour, 15 finds

[+Flintstone5611]

Congrats on what sounds like an awesome day! Amazing to see how much you can accomplish with planning and enthusiasm... and energy drinks, lol!!

[+all4familycaching]

Congrats and way to go to all of you. Now get some rest

[+t4e]

good job!

 

we were in the area too, managed 24

[+MontyFam]

Congrats team! 217 is pretty impressive. I was just scoping out the Caledan trail and hope to do it soon!

[+karen rinora]

I was in the same area the day after you, trying to do the complete "LL" loop. Congratulations on your team achievement!!! I really enjoyed doing teh Caledon Trailway caches last October.

[+Paul n Susan]

On a couple of occasions we have done 100+ caches.

 

In a month.

 

When you go out on a run like this (and this question is open to anyone who has done more than 30 caches in a day, as that is about our limit ... ), how do you keep track of the caches? Do you take notes? Do you take pictures? Do you have an app or some other method to log field notes on the fly? Do you have an incredible memory? Or do you cut-and-paste ... understandable, as it sometimes takes us an hour to log the 10 or so caches we may do in an afternoon.

 

We biked a bit of the Caledon rail trail and we found logging a challenge. We always feel we owe it to CO's and other cachers to create unique logs as opposed to cut-and-pastes, but we found it difficult to remember caches that were not *outstanding*. Cache hints helped us remember almost all of them, but we struggled, and there were a few that we drew a blank on although we knew we found them. Having said that, we really enjoyed the ride and the caches (didn't think we would!) and we plan on doing the rest of the trail this year, but we'd love to know how you all keep track of 'em.

[+t4e]

we did 56 in one day last year, on the bike

we each have an Oregon 450 and 550 respectively, when you log one you can write a note, not that we did

logging is C&P unless any of them stood out

what i like the most about those power trails is that either way you do them, bike or walking, the vision of that cache ahead just makes you push a bit further

i don't think i could go much further than the 56 a day though

[+Keith Watson]

We used a combination of paper, GPS, and BlackBerry to keep track of the finds and cross checked several times during the run to make sure our counts were correct. The logging was a lot of cutting and pasting. Took a few hours to log it all.

[+Paul n Susan]

I'm full of questions tonight. One of the biggest problems we have when trying to find *a ton* of caches in one big run is calling it quits. Keith, you report that you had 20+ DNF's. What was the longest that your group spent on a DNF and the longest you spent on a find?

 

This winter we spent about an hour looking for a cache that had been archived that very week. Lack of preparation on our part for sure, but the point being that there's that drive to find the cache! Had a goal that day to find 20-30 caches, but being stubborn set us back.

 

If you've set a goal to find n number of caches in a trip, when do you cut bait?

[+res2100]

I think that many caches took us 5 or 10 minutes to find. And likewise we would spend 5 or 10 minutes on a cache before moving on to the next if we didn't find it. I think we might have spent 15 minutes on Landslide which we dnfed, atleast it seemed like we were there for awhile. Knowing that we had a goal of finding 150 caches you do have to make a decision to move on at some point especially after searching 5 or 10 minutes and realizing you probably won't find it but there was always that urge to continue searching. By the time we hit 200 finds we had 16 dnfs.

 

As for keeping track, it was pretty easy as Keith created an excel spreadsheet from the mapsource route and it was just a matter of writing our numbers down on the list as we found the cache...1, 2, 3 etc and as Keith said we compared numbers every so often with those in other vehicles to make sure we were in sync. I also created a spreadsheet to fill in to keep track of our hourly totals.

 

I think the toughest thing was the planning. About a month before I started creating a list of caches and the route and that took hours and hours and hours and more hours especially with revising and changing the route a couple times. A bookmark list was created and put in order, which eventually I didn't bother with the order in the bookmark list as it served no purpose and was a pain to order as I also had the order in the route in mapsource which was much easier to do. Then a cuple weeks before a new series called London Loop started appearing every day so I added some of those to the list too. In the end we had over 400 caches on our list so we had plenty. We started in the rural area around London and not until the evening did we actually enter into London. I think this was the right choice since although caches were further apart, there was less/no traffic to get from cache to cache. We had 16 people that were taking part with 4 people in each van so that worked out well.

 

It's definitely not something I want to do every day, but it was a lot of fun for everyone and we surpassed our goal by a lot. Would I do it again? Maybe or most likely something similar.

[+Barnie's Band of Gold]

The level of organization made it easy to be a participant in this challenge. Having a goal that required a find every 9 minutes or so meant that quick decisions were needed when a DNF was apparent. Realistically having 16 searchers meant a number of people could be looking in more low percentage spots without too much impact on a quick find. Being spread out like this we could "call it" within as little as 5 minutes - equivalent to more than a hour of one person searching.

 

I'm hoping that follow-up to this occurs next year and I get the invite to participate again.

[+Team Hangman]

WTG gratz guys.... Sound like a fun day.. Why do i get the Feeling that it was RockHarder who hit the button on fire exstingisher?

[+Fuzzywhip]

Browsing thru the section and couldn't help but comment:

 

In the Pacific Northwest (mainly Washington State), we have a cacher who organizes "Cache Machines." It's a speed run thru a chosen city or area, to find as many caches as possible from a predetermined map, all in one very long day! Usually start before sunrise and end on or after sunset.

 

The most recent one was "Wenatchee Cache Machine II." The dinner after is the official event - GC2NVH2.

 

Follow the CO to his page and he has a link describing how he organizes these events (Post#98): http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=106202&st=50&p=1728799entry1728799

 

I've participated in six of these "cache machines" and they have been a blast! Get to meet a lot of cachers from all over the Northwest, find a lot of caches (my record is 86 in one day) and a good Smorg at the end of the day.

 

I'm hoping to host a similar event in the South Okanagan in the near future.

Edited April 24, 2011 by Fuzzywhip

[+ToonAl]

The level of organization made it easy to be a participant in this challenge. Having a goal that required a find every 9 minutes or so meant that quick decisions were needed when a DNF was apparent. Realistically having 16 searchers meant a number of people could be looking in more low percentage spots without too much impact on a quick find. Being spread out like this we could "call it" within as little as 5 minutes - equivalent to more than a hour of one person searching.

 

I'm hoping that follow-up to this occurs next year and I get the invite to participate again.

 

The question that I have been pondering is the critical mass. There has to be a perfect size where you get the above mentioned "kick" as well as remaining agile enough. At a certain group size moving that many people cache to cache must in itself become somewhat of a handicap.

[+Keith Watson]

After organizing 5 annual 24 hour runs and participating in a sixth, the number of people involved does make a difference. I have found around 12 or so people seems to make for the best of both worlds. Enough people that finding the cache is quick and not to many to coordinate. With the 200 in a day run it worked out well having all the people in only four vehicles. That made keeping track easier. We have also tried to make sure that if a vehicle became disabled there would be enough seats in the other vehicles to carry on. This was not only good to allow the hunt to continue but also as a safety feature to make sure no-one was left behind should a vehicle break down in an unsafe or remote location.