Let´s share the bad stuff :-D

[+Bychowiec]

Yey!  I just placed my first cache ever and now I have to wait for approval. Having done this I realize how much stuff I have gone thrue to do this. Not to mention when I first placed it! I have read rules, forums, I´ve found some caches to see how other have done this... but nothing can be compared to placing your own cache and realizing how badly placed it is ... and having to replace it.

 

I took my first cache and went out into a marsh with icecold water and smelly mud. The idea was to make sure that only geocachers go there. My choes became wet and cold, and oh that smell! And then I went home and started to write the description of it on the webbpage... and then... hey... can I really place this cache in a nature reserve? Nope! So I took on my wet shoes, and all my winter clothes (it´s a bit snowy and icy outside) and went back again, into the muddy water and replaced it. 

 

This is the kind of stuff you dont read anywhere in any rules - yeh, yeh; "follow the laws and local rules," but it doesn´t say that you might get mistaken about that, get wet, destroy your shoes anf still be a very happy geocacher  I learned a lot! In the futire I will read more about the area where I place my caches before I place them. And ugly smelly things can actually be protected, because if you look closer there aer some really interesting things worth to protect. 

 

What is your worst experience when placing a cache? What did that teach you? 

 

/Bychowiec

 

 

 

Edited November 21 by Bychowiec

[+x7Kevin]

That has happened to me a few times, I really should do a coordinates check beforehand but 99% of the time I'm very confident the spot is open/allowed so don't bother. The few times it has happened I was also hiding either mysteries or multis, so had to re-calculate the puzzles which was annoying. One time a spot had been open for over a year, but someone started the submission process for a new cache just a day before I think, ha ha. I guess that has taught me to never be completely sure a spot will work before my cache is published. 

 

I have not really had many bad experiences with the actual process of placing a cache though, it's usually a lot of fun for me. 

 

Good luck with your first hide being published! 

[+cerberus1]

4 hours ago, Bychowiec said:

This is the kind of stuff you dont read anywhere in any rules - yeh, yeh; "follow the laws and local rules," but it doesn´t say that you might get mistaken about that, get wet, destroy your shoes anf still be a very happy geocacher  I learned a lot! In the futire I will read more about the area where I place my caches before I place them.

Curious...  Did the landowner ask you about areas you wanted to place when you asked for permission?  Thanks.

We've been to park management, and they've asked us to stay out of areas they didn't want people walking (for a number of reasons).

[+TheLimeCat]

Getting permission to place a cache is one of the hardest parts of the process. I tend to assume that most people don't bother to ask, and a problem very rarely arises. However, if you do ask, and get in contact with a land manager, their knowledge of the cache subjects it to a much higher degree of scrutiny to absolve themselves of liability and ensure that the cache matches their management goals.

 

I have a couple caches in State Parks and one virtual in a National Park, and all of them took many months of correspondence to place and review, in addition to meeting a ranger on site and physically showing him the container and hiding place. Many other caches failed to develop at all because the land manager ghosted me, which happens all the time. It is very hard to get someone to devote time and energy to review and approve a geocache. 

[+niraD]

5 hours ago, Bychowiec said:

What is your worst experience when placing a cache? What did that teach you? 

I didn't realize how much abuse the location of my first hide received from skateboarders. I had to visit the site at least once a week, trying to keep the cache going. Eventually, they destroyed the wooden steps the cache was hidden under. After they city replaced the steps, before I could rebuild the camouflage to match the new steps, they destroyed the steps again. The city gave up, and so did I.

 

I learned a lot about choosing a location and hide style that isn't going to need a lot of maintenance from trying to keep that cache going.

[+barefootjeff]

My worst hiding experience was in 2022. There's a public reserve in Narara called Berry's Head, a steep forested hill with numerous rocky outcrops around the top and several walking tracks leading up and around it. Most importantly, the location appeared well clear of any other caches.

 

 

After exploring the area as a possible cache site, the phrase "they buried his head" kept echoing in my mind, leading to an idea for a multi called The Headless Horseman's Head. With halloween approaching, I was able to buy a good-sized plastic skull and put together an assortment of other waypoint objects, including a horse-shoe (off the headless horseman's horse, of course) that I'd recycled from a previous archived hide and a plastic scimitar (used to sever the horseman's head) I'd used at a dress-like-a-pirate event. I even found the perfect spot for the skull, a rock hollow just below the top of the hill that looked like a burial vault.

 

 

So, with labels for the waypoint objects laminated and affixed to them, I headed back up, placed everything and submitted the listing for publication. You can imagine my surprise and shock when it was rejected because of proximity to another cache. It turned out the cache in question was a puzzle I'd solved and found almost a decade earlier and had forgotten its final was at the top of the hill. All the website maps show solved-and-found mystery caches back at their bogus coordinates, which in this case is the yellow smiley in the lower left of the above map and a couple of kilometres from its final. That cache's exclusion zone covered the entire summit of the hill and included all my waypoints as well as the final so I had no choice but to abandon the idea and archive the unpublished listing, making a mental note to check for any solved-and-found puzzles within 3km of future cache locations and to request a coordinate check from the reviewer if I was at all unsure.

 

That cloud does have a silver lining, though, as a few months later I went exploring along a track in another public reserve and found a bunch of spots that would fit nicely with my Headless Horseman theme, including an appropriate crypt for ths skull. I even added another waypoint object, the Headless Horseman's ghost horse that lee737 kindly 3D-printed for me.

 

 

That one was all clear of other caches and published in December 2022 as GCA25XJ. To date it's had 15 finds and received 10 FPs.

[+Bychowiec]

19 hours ago, cerberus1 said:

Curious...  Did the landowner ask you about areas you wanted to place when you asked for permission?  Thanks.

We've been to park management, and they've asked us to stay out of areas they didn't want people walking (for a number of reasons).

In Sweden II guess it´s a bit different because of our allemansrätt. It says that we can move freely in nature, and pick berries and mushrooms as we want, just without breaking trees and so on. Normally my placement should not be a problem, but the area consists of old tree and special specimens of moss and so on. I didn´t think about that. I asked the municipality, the provincial goverment and so on..  it shouldn´t be any problem to place a cache in that area, but I was not that specific when I asked. I did not asked to place it out in the mud - that thought came to me when I placed the cache. LOL. So I corrected that mistake, and not the cache is places in the forrest (same area) where people rest their dogs. 

/Bychowiec

[+cerberus1]

5 hours ago, Bychowiec said:

In Sweden II guess it´s a bit different because of our allemansrätt.

Thanks.