deane | Entries tagged with geocaching

When I looked at the weather forecast last week it was pretty grim, predicting rain for all of this week. So I took the opportunity of an unexpectedly sunny day on Thursday to get in some geocaching. I searched for five different caches but only found three.

One of the delightful aspects of the weather out here is that if you don't like it you just need to wait a fews hours and there's a good chance it will be different. That applies to our weather forecasts as well. By the end of the weekend the forecast had brightened to include two sunny days this week. Today was one of them so once again I went out geocaching. This time I hunted for four caches but again only found three of them.

Seems like three cache finds per outing is my limit right now. Though I suppose if I actually got up before noon and managed to get out of the house before 14:00 I might have more time to hunt for caches. Just sayin'.

One of the caches that I found today was a very clever hide. There were a set of 180 steps (I counted them, twice) leading down to the beach from the road up on top of the cliffs. As is the custom around here the staircase was built out of big honking slabs of cedar. The cache owner had placed the cache inside a small, hollowed out block of cedar which was weathered to match the stairs and had attached it to part of the structure. It looked like it belonged there, although if you studied it closely enough you would have to conclude that it served no useful purpose. Very nice. Needed both clues to find it.

The weather is supposed to be good tomorrow as well. Let's see if I can get to bed early enough tonight to take advantage of it.

...and I'm standing just a few meters away, you can bet your ass that it makes a sound.

I didn't really feel like going geocaching today but the skies were relatively clear and the weather forecast showed overcast for the foreseeable future so if I didn't do it now I was going to have to suffer through withdrawal for the next week. As always, once over the initial hurdle of getting myself out the door I enjoyed the outing.

I found another three caches, bringing my total to 173. The falling tree occurred at the final cache. It started out sounding like someone had stepped on a twig. Then it turned into a sound like a branch falling through the forest canopy. Then it swelled into the creaking, cracking and crashing of significant quantities of wood. It wasn't a very big tree but it managed to give itself a fairly dramatic send-off.

Neither I nor the cache were harmed by the fall.

After picking up a replacement tube for one of the fluorescents in the kitchen, I decided to see if there were any caches near Canadian Tire that I could quickly do. It was already starting to get dark so I settled on two in Saxer Park, thinking that a city park would be open enough to make the most of the remaining light. It turned out that Saxer Park was in fact heavily wooded and I had to use my cellphone, with its brightness cranked up to the max, to find the second of the two caches.

That puts my count at 170 caches found.

Now this is where I get all geeky. I found my first cache back on February 28th of this year. I'd kind of like to have found 200 caches by my one year anniversary because that part of my brain which is devoted to bean counting, and it's an unusually large portion it seems, finds that thought pleasing. That means that I have to find 30 more caches before then.

In the 290 days since I started geocaching I've found 170 caches, which comes out to 0.5862 caches per day. There are 75 days left before Feb 28th, giving me 75 * 0.5862 = 43.97. Even if I don't find that last 0.97 of a cache, that's still plenty to get me to the 200 mark in time.

But wait. In those heady, exuberant days of having just discovered a new pastime I was going out geocaching almost every day. My current rate of cache-finding has slowed significantly since then. If I had to guess I'd say that these days I average about three new caches found each week. There are 10 weeks and five days between now and Feb 28th of next year. That comes out to 10.714 weeks x 3 caches/week = 32.1 caches. Tight, but it still gets me there.

Maybe I should double-check on my gut feel. Looking at my logs, in the past six months I've found 79 caches. That works out to 0.434 caches per day x 75 days = 32.6. Effectively the same number, which also shows that my gut feel of three caches a week was pretty close.

So no matter how I cut it, I'm mathematically assured of achieving my goal. In fact, the proof is so incontrovertible that I don't even have to go out caching any more. I can just sit back and let inevitability do the work for me. That's a relief.

(Package Waiting @ Post Office) + (New Cache Nearby) + (Clear Skies) -> (Opportunity I Can't Resist!)

The skies may have been clear but fog rolled in while I was at the Post Office. Didn't seem to affect my GPS, though, so chalk up another cache find.

The weather has been nice to me recently. It's been wet and overcast through the week but both this weekend and last the clouds decided to part and let the sun shine, just when I needed it most. Naturally, I took advantage of the good weather to do some geocaching.

I started out planning to hit about eight caches along Spruston Rd. The first cache took longer than it should have but I walked straight to the second without even using the GPS.

The second cache was located on a clearcut ridge looking east across the Strait of Georgia toward the Gulf Islands and the mainline. There was very little haze in the air and the view of the coastal mountains on the mainland was terrific.

( Click to see pictures of the mountains )
On the third cache I struck out. Before heading off to the fourth I looked at its online logs and found that that no one had been able to find it recently, which probably meant that it had been muggled. That kind of took the wind out of my sails so I decided to call it day, hopped back in the truck and headed home.

Thanks to some recent "improvements" it's no longer possible to make a left onto the highway from Spruston so I had to continue south to the light at Timberlands. I recalled that there were some caches around Timberlands and figured that since fate had forced me out that way I might as well make the most of it. I found two more caches bringing my total to 161.

I also found the Timberlands Pub. I never knew that there was anything out that way. I stopped there for dinner and had the butter chicken. It was quite good and the portion was hefty enough that I didn't bother with dessert afterward.

We had another power outage Friday morning but it only lasted about 10 minutes. I hadn't even finished shutting down all the computers before power was restored.

On Thursday the temperature finally climbed back above zero. Nowhere near the +6 that was originally predicted, but at least high enough for still-falling snow to turn to rain and start washing away some of the accumulated white stuff. Friday saw the temperature creep up a couple more degrees. Combined with heavier rainfall, the first patches of grass and bare gravel in the driveway began to reemerge from under the snow.

Our landlord returned from his Hawaiian vacation Friday afternoon and called in an expert to take a look at the water supply problem. Turns out it wasn't frozen pipes after all, or at least not just frozen pipes. The cold spell had also broken one of the pumps in the pump house. By late Friday afternoon the pump had been replaced and for the first time in four days I was able to have a shower and flush the toilet. Yippee!

Yesterday the sun came out and I was finally able to do some geocaching. The first cache was the most challenging as it was located of the side of a hill of loose earth which was still covered with snow and ice. I did manage to find it though, bringing my cache total to 155. The same cannot be said for the other two that I searched for. Despite being in relatively snow-free areas, I was unable to find either of them. So not the most successful outing in terms of cache count, but it still felt nice to get out of the house and tramp around in the woods for a bit. It's sunny again today so I hope to get out again and pick up one or two more.

The week ahead looks to remain mostly above zero with lots of rain. Not terribly promising for geocaching, but it should at least wash away the last of the snow and ice, which will be nice.

I was on vacation in Ontario all of last week and Monday of this week. While I like vacations, there's always a price to pay when they end. Despite judicious delegation on my part beforehand, I returned to find my mailbox weighed down with around 100 new emails, about 50 of which required some action on my part. It's already Thursday and I've only dealt with about 2/3 of them.

In happier news, last Thursday, while visiting with relatives, I was talking with my cousin K about geocaching. She wanted to know if there were any in the area so I whipped out my trusty cellphone and located one about ten blocks away. That got her all excited and we headed out to hunt it down. When we found it, it contained a fairly sad collection of trinkets, but K (who's a couple of years older than me) was like a child with a new toy, picking up each item and marveling at it. She talked about buying a GPS unit and getting into the sport. It will be interesting to see if she follows through.

On Sunday I went out geocaching again and found three more, bringing my total to 154. Look out 200, here I come!

One of the caches was a "travel bug motel", meaning that the owner had set it up as a safe place for travel bugs (have I explained those before?) to rest during their travels. I dropped off one that I'd picked up here on the island, singlehandedly upping its mileage by a factor of about 10. I picked up a geocoin (a travel bug in coin format) sporting the image of someone's pet cat and brought it back with me. When I looked up its history online I found that it had started out in New Brunswick, so by bringing it home I'll have completed its cross-country tour. I bet that will thrill its owner.

Unfortunately, I left the coin, along with some less important incidentals, stuffed into the seatback pouch on the plane. After a bit of frantic calling and leaving of messages I was relieved to find that someone had turned it in to the airline's lost and found. The airline's office is in Victoria, two hours away, so I had them courier it to me, at my expense. According to the online tracker, it should be here tomorrow. *phew*

I went geocaching with my friend G today. We found 3 caches which puts my total at 150 - a number which the paramour and I arbitrarily decided, back in March, were necessary and sufficient to consider oneself an "experienced" geocacher.

I will take your adulation as a given.

Normally I would go into exquisite detail about each cache, with particular attention devoted to those which annoyed me, but I'm entering this on my cellphone's tiny keyboard so alas, you'll have to make do with this brief summary.

EDIT: Changed "paranoid" to "paramour". I hate the autocompletion feature on this phone, although it does occasionally give amusing results.

I placed my first cache today, in Morden Colliery Park, which is just a couple of blocks from where I live. I submitted the listing to the cache coordinator for our area who will review it and hopefully post it within a few days.

It's common to place a "First To Find" (FTF) prize in the cache, which is something of real value for the first person to find the cache. My FTF prize is a $25 gift card to the local Superstore. That's a bit rich by geocaching standards, where FTFs are more in the $5-10 range, but we had a bunch of the gift cards lying around the house and it was my first cache, so what the heck.

Many thanks to the paramour as it was zie who, several months ago, picked up the containers and various goodies to go in them, so that we could create our own caches whenever the urge struck.

I put the cache together last night and gave it to the paramour to look at. I later found the cache back on my desk along with a small plastic tree frog about 2cm long. I smiled, thinking that the paramour had left it as joke. But when I reached out to pick up the frog it jumped off my desk! It wasn't plastic after all. We looked around a bit for it but it seems to have escaped into the dust bunny jungle which flourishes beneath our furniture. I wish it luck but don't give it good odds of survival, what with 4+ bored cats hanging around the house all the time. How it got onto my desk in the first place, I don't know. I imagine it must have come into the house earlier when we had the front door open to let in some fresh air.

I must say, though, that the real frog looked almost as realistic as a plastic one.

You're probably all tired of my geocaching reports, so today I've included some pictures to suck you into reading yet another one.

( Read more... )

I didn't bother to bore you with tales of my geocaching adventures last weekend, so I'll do it now.

( Read more... )

A week ago Friday the paramour and I went out to P's shop to see the shiny new countertop in our boat's galley. Afterward we went for a stroll in nearby Transfer Beach Park, where I managed to score another geocache.

Good thing, too, as my geocaching experience the next day was an abysmal failure.

( Read more... )

Yesterday alix and I went to the Cowichan Fair, at their brand-spanking-new fairground just north of Duncan. I've been to Nanaimo's agricultural fair a couple of times but this was my first time at Cowichan's, so I can't say how the new grounds compare to the old, but they were pretty darned good. Nicely laid out, a place for everything and everything in its place.

As is the way with such fairs, there were lots of little things of interest but nothing earth shattering. The most remarkable item was probably one of the live bands playing on the stage, Group Social. I can't find a web-page for them, so I hope I got the name right. They were quite good and did some excellent covers of popular 80's and 90's rock hits.

Some other highlights:

The prize-winning sunflower was twice my height.

There were food stands selling falafel, curry and pad thai. At a county agricultural fair. How cool is that?

A kid asked his mom, "Why are these rabbits so big?". "They're meat bunnies," she replied. "What's a meat bunny?" Oh innocent youth.

One of the goats had chewed halfway through one of the timbers holding his pen together. On the plus side, he had one more day of fair in which to complete his work and make good his escape. On the minus side, he'd exposed the sharp ends of several brass screws and was in danger of cutting his mouth on them.

The weather was great: cool and overcast. I hate wandering around a fairground in the baking sun. It did eventually start to rain toward the end of our visit, but just a light sprinkle which didn't really affect us.

Today the light sprinkle turned to a heavy drizzle. Despite yesterday's outing I was feeling antsy and wanted to get out of the house again, so I threw on my raincoat and went geocaching. Got soaked despite the rain gear but managed to pick up three more caches, bringing my total to 126.

I did another geocaching outing today. A big one this time. To spare those of you who don't care, I've put the details behind a cut.

( Click for detailed blow-by-blow, plus special victory dance )

Got up late today and was bumming around the house, accomplishing nothing, so I decided to go out and do some geocaching. Looked for four, only found two. A good average for baseball, less so for geocaching.

The first of the two that I missed was at Cather Lake, a small, narrow lake which lies just off Jingle Pot Road. Houses back onto it on both sides, with small strips of greenspace at each end of the lake. And I mean really small, maybe 10m wide by 50m long. The cache was located in the middle of the strip at the northwest end of the lake. The hint said "rock". There were two small boulders at the GPS coords so I poked and prodded around them for a few minutes but came up empty handed. I gave up pretty quickly because I felt so obvious and exposed since I was visible from all of the nearby backyards. This is a problem I often have with caches in urban settings. It's the first time I've seen Cather Lake, though, so that was nice.

The second miss was of a more annoying sort. It was just off the Parkway Trail, which runs alongside the highway, and the hint said simply "tall grass". There was lots of tall grass about and a road worker was out cutting some of it down while I was there. It's bad enough to give such a non-specific clue, but to use something ephemeral like grass is just dumb.

The two finds made up for the misses, though. The first one was is hidden in plain view, I just had be standing in the right place to see it. I like those kinds of caches as they really make me rethink what it means for something to be "hidden". It doesn't necessarily have to be covered up.

For the second find the cache itself and its hiding place were nothing special, but the general area was interesting. It was in a small clearing far enough from the highway to muffle the traffic noise. Scattered about the clearing where the rusting remains of a handful of old cars and trucks. I know that it's someone's old garbage, but unlike glass or plastic at least steel is relatively easy for nature to reclaim. And there's little enough of it left now that what remains gains something of an air of mystery and antiquity.

But the big news from the outing was that I managed not to lacerate myself on brambles. I got a few pricks while poking around for caches, but my dermis remained intact! Maybe by this time next week it will no longer look like I got into a knife fight with a midget.

My cache count now stands at 115.

Back at the start of the year I had one of my "down" periods, where I find it difficult to put in a full day of work. I can have down periods at any time of the year, but the worst ones seem to happen during the winter months, which leads me to suspect that SAD might have a part to play.

Most of my down periods are brief but the one at the start of the year lasted for several months and by late April I'd accrued a whopping 207 hour deficit. Since then I've been putting in increasing amounts of overtime in an attempt to get my main project back on track. As a result the deficit is now down to just 38 hours, or about a week of work. If I keep up my current pace I'll have worked that off before the end of September.

Of course all work and no play is just the sort of regimen that can lead to a down period, so today I decided to take a break and do a bit more geocaching. I went back to the same general area as last weekend but this time the trail I was looking for was well-defined and no bushwacking was required. Wary from last week's injury, I nonetheless tried to be more careful this time, but I needn't have bothered. At one point I spotted a single stalk of bramble arching low across the path ahead of me. I carefully stepped over it with my right foot, then carefully lifted my left foot...and STILL my toe caught on the bramble. By this time I was already shifting my weight onto my right, leading foot, so I was helpless to do anything but watch, in that slow motion way in which all disasters seem to unfold, as my left foot dragged the bramble across the back of my right leg, again, lacerating it, again.

Oh well. At least the cuts are lower down this time so they didn't reopen last week's wounds.

Looking at the two sets of cuts on my right leg, I cannot help but be amazed. Not just at my own ineptitude, but also at the body's incredible ability to heal itself. The multitude of cuts from last week are down to just three pale pink lines, looking not dissimilar to the lines you get when you wake up with pillow face. The new cuts had clotted and stopped bleeding within five minutes of the injury. Twenty minutes later the pain had ceased so long as I didn't move my leg. An hour later even movement was pain-free and the cuts only hurt if I touched them. Another day or two and I'll have forgotten they're even there.

Here's a picture of the two sets of injuries, with Bear checking to see if there's anything edible:

( Click to see picture )

Two more caches found brings my total to 113. I need to find one more in the next two days to bring my total for August to a nice, round, 10 caches. That's not likely to happen tomorrow since I'm having dinner with friends, so either I head out again after dinner tonight or I find time for a quickie after work on Tuesday.

Three weeks ago our landlord announced that he wanted to tear down our rotting shed and replace it with a carport/workshop. While we welcome the change, it did mean that we suddenly had just a week to get everything cleared out of the shed, sorted and disposed of. Ugh.

Add to that a series of problems at work which were putting my main project ever more behind schedule and throw in a bit of a heatwave here at home. The result was that I hadn't been out geocaching since my Maple Mountain outing back at the start of the month.

The shed is now history, the heat has abated and this past week I was able to make up some of the lost time on my project at work. So I decided to reward myself with a bit of geocaching today.

At least, I think it was a reward.

I went hunting for three caches in the same general area. For the first two I was never able to find the "right" trail leading to the cache and had to bushwack my way in and out of them both. The second one was particularly brutal. My return path was ill chosen and I ended up in the middle of a thicket of brambles. I have this bad habit of catching brambles with the toe of my trailing foot as I'm bringing it forward, dragging them across the back of the other leg, slicing it to ribbons in the process. Happens to me every year, multiple times a year. If there's a slope to my learning curve on this, it ain't positive. So now the back of my right leg is crisscrossed by bright red slashes. It looks like I attempted suicide but had no idea of what I was doing.

On the bright side, I did manage to find all three caches, which puts my count at 111. Woo-hoo!

Today I went geocaching on Maple Mountain, just east of Duncan. The weather was good, though it helped that I was in shade most of the time, so my sunscreen didn't have to work too hard.

( Read more... )

In 1926 a Canadian Pacific Railway employee named Jack Cartwright lived for a period of time in a small cave in the woods a couple of kilometers from where I live. I only found out about it because someone put a geocache there.

( Click for pictures. )

Tonight I ate at Diner's Rendezvous for the first time. It's a bit pricier than, say, Smitty's (average of $23 per entree as opposed to $14) but not unreasonable. The food and service were both quite good. This is the sort of restaurant where they take miniscule portions and try to arrange them artistically on the plate to make you feel better about going home hungry. The thing is, the portion was actually quite filling. Somehow they've mastered the art of giving you a decent serving of food but arranging it such that you think you're being ripped off. I can see that going over well with the guilt-dieting crowd.

The interior lighting was rather dim. Since I was by myself I wanted to read during dinner so I had them seat me by the front window where there was lots of outside light. My presence there didn't seem to adversely affect their business as there was a pretty good stream of customers coming in while I ate.

After dinner I went back to the place where the paramour and I had failed to find two geocaches a couple of weeks ago. This time I was able to find both of them in short order. In part that was due to additional hints which the cache owners had emailed me after I logged my DNFs¹, but primarily I think that I was just out of it the last time, having been plagued by both hay-fever and mosquitoes. Both caches were in places that I'd checked the previous time but obviously not carefully enough.

One of the two was my first multi-cache, which is a cache consisting of multiple stages. This one was a two-stage cache, with the first providing coordinates to the second which then held a regular lock 'n lock cache container filled with baubles. What I had been looking for at the first stage was a standard micro-cache — a bison tube, film canister, etc — with a piece of paper inside giving the coordinates to the second stage. What hadn't occurred to me was that since the only thing that the cache needed to provide was coordinates it needn't be in any kind of container. For example, the coordinates could be carved into the bark of a tree (though I hope no one ever does that) or spray-painted into a piece of roadside graffiti. So my search criteria had been too narrow. That said, it was still pretty bloody obvious.

The second cache was equally obvious. In fact it was in a place that I had searched the previous time, but apparently not well enough.

That now puts my count at 102 caches found. A small step on my way toward the next milestone at 150.²

¹ DNF = Did Not Find.

² Why 150? When we first started out, the paramour and I pondered how many caches it would be before we could consider ourselves to be "experienced geocachers". 100 seemed a bit too low and 200 a bit too high so we split the difference and made it 150.

Focussed On The Future

The Power Of Three?

If A Tree Falls In The Forest...

Trust Me, This Won't Interest You

PW@PO + NCN + CS -> OICR!

Clear Across The Strait

Things Are Looking Up

Back To Work, And A Kitty Goes Missing!

An Experienced Geocacher

My First Cache, Now With Added Tree Frog!

Boring Cache Report, But Cool Pictures

A Lovely Day

Geofailure

Cowichan Fair, And You-Know-What

Caching Fever

Geoscratchless!

Geoscratching, Part 2

Geoscratching

Afternoon On Maple Mountain

Jack Cartwright's Cave

How The Heck Did I Miss That?

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April 2014

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