Almost Ftf?

October 31, 2004

It happened to me again. Yesterday. I saw a new cache listed, got all prepared, drove the 20+ miles to the site, and found...nothing. I was so pumped up to be FTF, and couldn't find a thing.

I came home, saw a log that it'd been found. Ugh! According to the finders, the coords were about 50' off. I only concentrated on about a 15' area. Rookie mistake.

I found it today.

Has anyone else dealt with this? Going out to be FTF, only to not find anything, come home and see someone else has found YOUR FTF?

7.2k · October 31, 2004

Well, no. I couldn't hardly claim to be FTF if I didn't find it.

I have been on site of a new cache only to discover that it had not yet been placed.

I do take it you posted your DNF on it, right? I do.

October 31, 2004

Yes, I have. Again, mine was a rookie mistake. It was a small cache in a cemetary. I had just gotten my Legend and wasn't used to it. I looked for over an hour. The cache was listed as a "cache & grab" and an easy find. I got back home and listed a DNF. Someone came behind me and got FTF. They said it was easy and could not understand how I had trouble. I am not that interested in FTFs nowadays. If I get one, fine, otherwise the earth won,t stop. Good luck & remember to have fun playing the game!

9.5k · October 31, 2004

Going out to be FTF, only to not find anything, come home and see someone else has found YOUR FTF?

Well I'm not sure how someone else can find your FTF, but you'll know it's your find when you log it.

2.6k · October 31, 2004

Has anyone else dealt with this? Going out to be FTF, only to not find anything, come home and see someone else has found YOUR FTF?

Oh, ya I've done that. The whole thrill of being the FTF and ending up with the FT-DNF instead. But that's the chances you take when you want to be first. That's also why there's a FTF prize... to compensate the first person for verifying you did the cache correctly. Bad coordinates suck but they do happen.

You think being the FT-DNF is bad, how about being the FTF on a multi cache no one else could complete and when you open the final cache up, you find out you've been had - three cachers had already found the cache but didn't log the find nor spill the beans - even lured you into believing you'd be the FTF. That sucks. Doesn't it, [insert local cachers name here]?!!

2.6k · October 31, 2004

Going out to be FTF, only to not find anything, come home and see someone else has found YOUR FTF?

Well I'm not sure how someone else can find your FTF, but you'll know it's your find when you log it.

BTW, I followed your example even though some others didn't.

TITLE: Almost FTF

2.5k · October 31, 2004

Has anyone else dealt with this? Going out to be FTF, only to not find anything, come home and see someone else has found YOUR FTF?

Oh, ya I've done that. The whole thrill of being the FTF and ending up with the FT-DNF instead. But that's the chances you take when you want to be first.

I had that happen to me on a difficulty four micro... You know, the kind that's a magnetic thing stuck to the side of something.... ARGH!

November 1, 2004

I once missed FTF on one when the coords put me smack in front of a huge No Trespassing! sign. Turned out the coords were off by more than 300 feet!

Oh well. Sometimes you get the worm. Sometimes the worm gets you.

November 1, 2004

Well, no. I couldn't hardly claim to be FTF if I didn't find it.

I have been on site of a new cache only to discover that it had not yet been placed.

I do take it you posted your DNF on it, right? I do.

I always post my visits...whether I find them or not. The pride takes a hit, but oh well.

November 1, 2004

Going out to be FTF, only to not find anything, come home and see someone else has found YOUR FTF?

Well I'm not sure how someone else can find your FTF, but you'll know it's your find when you log it.

I think you read it a bit too literally. If you read the Topic title it read: Almost FTF.

Thanks for stopping by.

9.5k · November 1, 2004

Going out to be FTF, only to not find anything, come home and see someone else has found YOUR FTF?

Well I'm not sure how someone else can find your FTF, but you'll know it's your find when you log it.

I think you read it a bit too literally. If you read the Topic title it read: Almost FTF.

Thanks for stopping by.

I read it, then you qualified it with your OP.

Has anyone else dealt with this? Going out to be FTF, only to not find anything, come home and see someone else has found YOUR FTF?

So... when you stop and think about it... mine was not a SA remark.

Thanks for stopping by.

Anytime.

2.3k · November 1, 2004

We've logged DNF's on unfound caches that turned out to have coordinates off by hundreds of feet, and even one that hadn't been physically placed yet... Stuff happens. life goes on.

November 1, 2004

Almost all the ftf's i try for are ussally there very first cache to place and i never find it because they went to the top of the hill to get the coords. or accrost the street or somthing like that

5.7k · November 1, 2004

Some of my most rewarding FTFs were ones where something was wrong with the cache. Bad coords, incorrect puzzle solution, etc. One of the challenges for the FTFder is to try and overcome these obstacles and still find the cache. Also, the FTFder doesn't have the help of previous log entries. I once found a cache that the coords were off by over 400 feet. I thought that was amazingly lucky.

--Marky

November 2, 2004

Being conscientious cachers, we did not want to place our new cache until it was actually approved. It got approved on a Friday night and we decided to place the cache on our way to a day of caching first thing Saturday. When we got home to log our finds somebody had logged our new cache and we figured out that they had to have been in the park while we were placing it (it is a multi). There should be a delay between approval and activation, maybe.

2k · November 2, 2004

Being conscientious cachers, we did not want to place our new cache until it was actually approved. It got approved on a Friday night and we decided to place the cache on our way to a day of caching first thing Saturday. When we got home to log our finds somebody had logged our new cache and we figured out that they had to have been in the park while we were placing it (it is a multi). There should be a delay between approval and activation, maybe.

Why would you place the cache after it was approved? That doesn't make any sense to me.

If a cache goes online, I'm usually there within the hour if my schedule permits it. I'd be really po'd to find out that the cache wasn't actually there!

5.7k · November 2, 2004

Being conscientious cachers, we did not want to place our new cache until it was actually approved. It got approved on a Friday night and we decided to place the cache on our way to a day of caching first thing Saturday. When we got home to log our finds somebody had logged our new cache and we figured out that they had to have been in the park while we were placing it (it is a multi). There should be a delay between approval and activation, maybe.

Why would you place the cache after it was approved? That doesn't make any sense to me.

If a cache goes online, I'm usually there within the hour if my schedule permits it. I'd be really po'd to find out that the cache wasn't actually there!

Same here. If you need to get a cache approved before you place it (for whatever reason), make sure you leave an Approver Note telling the approver that the cache is not in place yet. Ask them to disable the cache before approving it, so that it won't show up on anyone's query. After you place the cache, you can enable it. This way, nobody will go searching for a cache that isn't there.

--Marky

November 2, 2004

It is a somewhat long multi cache.....why go through the trouble of placing it if it is not going to be approved? At the very worst, you would have seen us at the park, we were there at opening time. Between cache approval and placement, the park was closed.

2.5k · November 2, 2004

Oh well. Sometimes you get the worm. Sometimes the worm gets you.

Worm got me yesterday. The cache I went for the first stage was off by about 180 feet. The second stage was gettable by math. Seeing as though the math was based on the start cords............

5.7k · November 2, 2004

It is a somewhat long multi cache.....why go through the trouble of placing it if it is not going to be approved? At the very worst, you would have seen us at the park, we were there at opening time. Between cache approval and placement, the park was closed.

See my comments above as a way to do this with no risk of there being a window of opportunity for a cacher to see the coords to the cache and go hunt it before the cache is there.

Another alternative in situations like this is just send your approver an e-mail with your intent to hide a cache along with the details (coords, etc.), and ask them if they think the placement will be approved.

Either method works. I would highly recommend not using your previous method. If you do choose to use this method, please include a note on the originally submitted cache page that the cache has not been placed yet. Once the cache has been approved, immediately disable it, go hide the cache, remove the statement saying that the cache is not placed yet and enable the cache.

Just trying to give you some options so that other cachers won't end up hunting for a cache that isn't there.

--Marky

November 12, 2004

I set out to make my first cache a FTF, but it wasn't bad coordinates or pending approval or unposted finds that "took away" my FTF, it was just that I started a couple of hours later than the FTF team. D'oh...

Still looking for that first FTF though...

2k · November 12, 2004

Has anyone else dealt with this? Going out to be FTF, only to not find anything, come home and see someone else has found YOUR FTF?

I spotted a new cache listing once near a city I was visiting. (It was placed for a community education class in geocaching.) I rushed out to find it. Drove around the countryside trying to figure out how to get to the coordinates. Finally gave up.

Then I gave some more thought to the coordinates and the location and decided they had made an error in posting the coordinates, so the location was actual 8 miles away. Got up early the next morning to claim a FTF with horrible coordinates.

Found the cache and found 2 log entries from students in the class. (They obviously had been given the correct coordinates in the class.)

So I claimed a first to find with the posted coordinates...and first to log online (the other two never did log online)...but, of course, I wasn't the first to find.

Edited November 12, 2004 by beejay&esskay

7.3k · November 12, 2004

We were almost not FTF on a puzzle cache. Same sort of problem, it is a puzzle cache, with the puzzle incorrect, and the final coords at least 50' off. Fortunately, our deductive reasoning helped us fix the problem in the puzzle, and also figure out the final spot. But we sweated for a while. Told the owner about it, but he never fixed anything. Probably why there has only been 5 finders in the 5 months that it has been out. It's too bad, since the puzzle is really cool.

5.3k · November 20, 2004

It happened to me again. Yesterday. I saw a new cache listed, got all prepared, drove the 20+ miles to the site, and found...nothing. I was so pumped up to be FTF, and couldn't find a thing.
I came home, saw a log that it'd been found. Ugh! According to the finders, the coords were about 50' off. I only concentrated on about a 15' area. Rookie mistake.

I found it today.

Has anyone else dealt with this? Going out to be FTF, only to not find anything, come home and see someone else has found YOUR FTF?

Thats nothing, I stayed up to learn how to read music online on night so that I could decode the clue to a new cache, Well I figured out how to read enough music to search for the cache. This cache was 90 miles away. I get there and I could not find it, someone else got the FTF after I left. I went back a few weeks later with my girl freind and she finds it in just a couple of minutes.

November 30, 2004

Oh but you are even luckier than being the FTF. Your the First Loser (Per DUC961).

December 3, 2004

Once when I was young I got up really early in the morning so I could open the new jar of peanut butter and make the first mark...only to find my sister had beat me to it. I am reminded of that each time I get skunked on what I thought would be an ftf. Each time it happens I have a strange feeling of hunger for peanut butter. :blink:

Almost Ftf?

Recommended Posts

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Link to comment

Join the conversation