Is this normal?

[+acprc]

Hi all,

 

Left a nice Geo-coin (Help for Heroes Geocoin) in the USA at a popular cache while on holiday, but it vanished very quickly and hasn't resurfaced yet.

 

Is this normal and just something I need to get used to? A bit dissapointed as I hoped it would move about the USA.

 

Adam

Edited December 8, 2011 by acprc

[+Ike 13]

It's normal. Sometimes someone just picks it up and is on vacation so they don't log it right away. Sometimes it's someone new who doesn't know how to log it. Sometimes it's a thief. Sometimes it's someone who thinks it is just swag so they trade for it and keep it.

[+seldon]

Sadly, it often happens. On the other hand, some trackables travel for years without problems. You never know...

[+Isonzo Karst]

Yes, it's normal for trackables to go missing. In this case however, I'd still be hopeful about this one. You left it in a popular cache in an area where there are many vacationers during the fall and winter months.

It may well yet be logged by the person who took it - they could still be on their travels and haven't logged trackables yet.

[+Team Dennis]

I seem to recall someone once had a travel bug that was a rusty railroad spike that vanished. So yeah, it happens.

[+The_Incredibles_]

When I first started caching, I was told not to bother with geocoins, as they go missing at an alarmingly high rate. Like others said, it's possible someone forgot to log it or perhaps it was stolen.

[+The Blorenges]

Placed in the cache on 11th October, reported as "not there" on 19th October.

 

Thanks to the Blue Man (who took the trouble to log that note) you have only 3 possible cachers who've logged the cache during that period, who might have retrieved your coin. In these circumstances, if it was my geocoin that had disappeared, I would now send extremely polite emails to those 3 cachers enquiring whether they might have the coin in the hopes of jogging someone's memory to log it correctly.

 

Of course, it is possible it's been stolen by someone who's been to the cache without logging their visit. I hope that it re-appears somewhere soon for you. My Help for Heroes coin only managed 163 miles - which was disappointing. Fortunately, most of my travelling coin have clocked up a higher mileage than that.

 

MrsB

[+jellis]

Noticed on the 16th of Oct and also on Nov 2 cachers mentioned moving trackables.

What I do is contact cachers between the time you dropped it and the time it went missing and send them a note asking if they either saw it or picked it up. Sometimes they forget, sometimes they figure they will get around to it later.

Edited December 9, 2011 by jellis

[+TerraViators]

IBTM

[+acprc]

Thanks all for your posts (sorry terra don't know what IBTM means!). I will send a few messages as suggested and see what happens. We are both new to geocaching and got the coin specifically for our trip to the USA. Hopefully it will turn up. I guess the secret is to get more going and then i will always have more to watch that are moving.

[+power69]

Thanks all for your posts (sorry terra don't know what IBTM means!)

In before the move[to the geocoin forum]

[AZcachemeister]

When I first started caching, I was told not to bother with geocoins, as they go missing at an alarmingly high rate. Like others said, it's possible someone forgot to log it or perhaps it was stolen.

 

For some unexplained reason, Geocoins seem to compromise certain folks' morals and the coins are getting stolen almost as fast as they get sent out. I don't understand why.

 

Lately it seems I have been seeing more actual coins in circulation, so perhaps the thieves are running out of closet space.

[+Isonzo Karst]

Geocoins seem to compromise certain folks' morals and the coins are getting stolen almost as fast as they get sent out

 

this is conventional wisdom, but I'm not convinced that it is true. My own trackables are too small a sample to be statistically significant, but the disappear v continue to travel rate is about the same on bugs re coins in that group.

 

I suspect that the smaller size of coins has more to do with the tendency for them to disappear then compromised morals. They're so easy to drop into a day bag/pack and forget. The tendency for cachers to think it's a good idea to carry coins to vacation spots works against them as well. Living in Florida, I see this a lot. People can carry coins easily, drop them here - the next traveler picks it up, puts in some travel bag and forgets all about it. hey, they're traveling, out of the usual routine, a bit excited and maybe tired too. The coin? what coin? (the Florida Keys are a death zone for geocoins, believe me on this).

 

I've had a coin come back to life after several years, when the guy "found it" in his desk. Good labeling helps a lot.

[AZcachemeister]

It's certainly true that regular Travel Bugs go missing plenty of times.

 

Perhaps it's just my perception, but I'm pretty sure that (in regard to Geocoins) there have been many more cases where there were NO intervening logs between 'Dropped coin' and 'Didn't see any coin'.

 

I'm always hopeful that any missing trackable may resurface, and I can't wait to find that ammo can brimming with coins 'returned' by a repentant thief!

[Keystone]

I am moving this thread from the Geocaching Topics forum to the Geocoin Discussions forum.

[+acprc]

Well i live in hope that it will surface. I had a TB that was dropped in a cache here in the UK that suddenly got found in a cache in Germany!

 

I guess I will wait and see. It had put me off releasing anymore coins though.

[+Fianccetto]

I have a number of coins/trackables which are missing but have also had a few resurface. Moving them around is part of the game, so it's inevitable that they seem to disappear from time to time. I just checked and found out our own H4H coin has gone missing (since June).