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Is the FLASH a Geocacher?


Greyroamer

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I am curious about the high number of caches logged by some members. I was glancing at one member's stats to find that they had a "best day" of 188 caches on the one day. Another had 284 and a third had 325 Even allowing for the idea of scrabbling around in the dark with a torch, this seems a little hard to believe. Using a more reasonable estimate of 14 hours continuous searching, for 188 finds this amounts to 1 find every 4 minutes and 28 seconds, including time to move from 1 cache to the next. For 284 finds, this is one every 2 minutes and 58 seconds and for 325 finds, this is one every 2 minutes and 35 seconds. I also notice that several members with many thousands of finds, have not permitted public view of their statistics. I wonder why?

 

Am I missing something here? Is there a way of teleporting from one location to another that is not included in the orientation video? Or is it allowable to log caches when you drive past at high speed? Or is there simply some sort of ego thing about having more finds than anybody else. Seems to me that rather defeats the underlying concept of geocaching.

 

Regards

 

Mike

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I've had 768 finds in one day and am far from the record, it's not hard to maintain a cache a minute and with the right group you can maintain that for most the day.

 

I did and will do it again because the whole experience is fun.

Edited by Roman!
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My best day so far has been fifteen caches in a day, so I can't say for sure from personal experience. However, there are a couple possibilities here.

 

Chances are, the person is doing a power trail. Here in my area, there is a walking/biking trail that runs several miles and is VERY heavily saturated - my list where I first started saving caches along the trail (which, because this is a favorite exercise trail for a lot of cachers, has changed, adding some and archiving a few, even in the month or two since I started my bookmark list) has nearly two hundred caches on it. I've gone for a couple of those caches, and because of the way the trail is set up, most are fairly easy, geared towards being family-friendly since the trail is so great for family outings. It would not be difficult to take the bike along the trail and tackle a couple hundred finds.

 

Another possibility is that they are caching with a group, making the search go that much more quickly. Then everyone in the group logs the find, regardless of which specific member actually spotted the cache first.

 

Incidentally, to answer your initial question, I do not think that a GPSr could keep up with our pal Barry enough to make his speed a factor in geocaching :laughing: Possibly if Cisco were helping from the other end... hm...

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Powertrails. It's what they're for. There where some cachers that managed 500 caches in 24 hours, by doing powertrails, in my city. I personally did 100 caches in 2 hours. Plus those stats are when the cache is logged as being found, not when it's actually found. Lots of cachers don't log from a cellphone, so if a cacher visits my city for a weekend and gets 1000 caches (which is easy to do) they might wait until they get home to log, and then may not change the date, so 300 a day over 3 days appears as 1000 in one day. They may not care about their stats as much as others do.

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Power trails. Dozens or even hundreds of identical generic hides placed every. 528 feet along a bike path or roadway. You can rack up some big numbers doing a power trail.

 

There are also techniques (some questionable) that allow for even higher numbers on power trails. One is having a stamp or stickers made up with your caching name ..just slap a stamp on the logsheet and move on, none of that tedious archaic signing with a pen.

 

Another is moving the containers...since a power trail usually consists of identical cheap containers (usually film canisters), the cacher starts off the trail by replacing the first container with a container of his own containing a blank log sheet, and takes the first container with him. If someone else does the driving, he can sign that log while traveling to the next cache, exchange that container for the one at the second stop, sign that one while traveling to the third stop, and repeat for the length of the trail. It's technically against the guidelines to take or move someone else's cache, but power trails are a different animal and the CO's who place them pretty much know that some of these techniques are going to be used.

 

Real power caching is often done by a team, so that someone does the driving and two or more others take turns actually jumping out of the vehicle and grabbing the cache, so everyone else can take a break and avoid getting fatigued. They use a team name to sign the log and each team member logs the find online individually later (another generally accepted practice, even on non-power trail caches)

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Personally, I'd only log finds that I personally found myself - or at a minimum I wrote my username / stamp on the paper myself. I'm not a fan of the technique of sending ten people out to find ten different caches and then collectively they all log 100 caches (even though each only found 10). But that's one the advantages of the game - it's so flexible!

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