Geocaching

Thursday 12 July 2012 Gradually the cloudy sky broke up and there was plenty of sun for this bushwalk taking us past the three caches in the Bluff River Gorge. After not being able to get across the river last year, we walked directly to the upper crossing point without walking the western side track within the gorge. Once over the river we gradually gained height and reached Looping the Bluff !. Following lunch on a heathy ledge in the sun, with marvellous views of the cliffs on each side we moved on to recross the river and head to Sanding Room Only , followed by No Bluffing, By Gorge ! to round off the day. Graham51 was on the walk so it was joint operation, with help from three others. Looping the Bluff ! Our walk brought us to this site first, and using the clues we encouraged Sabine to discover what a geocache was. She was a little hesitant to put her hand in the hiding location, but after assurances from Graham51 that all would be OK she felt plastic and soon had it out. ...

Friday 6 July 2012 Quite a few months ago Barad Bunch suggested trying to find some of his Kalang series, so Peter had a look and realised that it was going to require a bit of brain power to solve. At first it looked like A|C|G|T (KK 04) may be the easiest, but several attempts to work it out failed. The only thing to do was email Barad Bunch for some help; the reply was “well that is probably the hardest, try some others first”. Well we did but it became clear that this was seriously tough work and Barad had to put up with several more requests for hints of what to do. The only one of the five solved that didn’t need his help was Noughts and Crosses (KK 02). So a really big thanks to Barad for his forbearance. We worked out the route to take with a bit of Google Earth plotting and set out on what was a superbly beautiful day; in fact it reached 17 degrees. Not long after ticking off the first one a woman walked past with her dog and, on seeing us with a GPS and a looking at a sheet ...

Wednesday 4 July 2012 We had two reasons for walking up beside New Town Creek today; one was to deposit three moveable caches we had recently picked up from Knocklofty. The other was to locate the New Town Rivulet Track series. We started near New Town Rivulet Track #3 , which was quickly found by Sue, despite getting her feet wet crossing the creek. The tiny “ Leaps the Frog ” was dropped off near here. It was then on upstream to #4 where we looked about a bit before Peter spotted a bit of tatty old plastic in a tree, which really was just rubbish, but it did lead his eye to spot the real thing. Upstream further was the one described by some logs as a bit scary and it does have the sub title of “Deadly Peril”; #5 . Although Peter knew full well that it was not real, he nevertheless still jumped a bit when he looked closely in the hidey spot. Well so far so good, but we came crashing down on #6. On reaching GZ both the sub title “Straight Six” and the GPS had us looking at the obviou...

Wednesday 27 June 2012 Well the weather was just ideal for a bushwalk to the Three Thumbs and to collect a few geocaches during the trip. However, the geocaching part looked a bit shaky as Peter’s GPS did not display any in the area. A later check at home showed the records were on the GPS and when overwritten with a new copy they displayed OK; puzzling! All was not lost because Barad Bunch had notes on the caches and the grid on his GPS. This enabled us to locate the one near the cars. After morning tea at the lookout over Maria Island we commenced the walk to the Three Thumbs. Shady spots had plenty of frost but a fair bit of the way was along the tops of the main ridge and in the sun. Eventually we w ere on the highest peak, presumably the third Thumb and also what we presumed would be the hiding placed of the “ Three Thumbs Up ” geocache. But when Barad checked his GPS it indicated it was over 400 metres away on the peak previous climbed and descended from. Oh well that would have...

Thursday 28 June 2012 A message came through that Kirby the Frog could not be found so we planned a walk to check this out. Before going, however, Peter looked at the web site and noticed that several other moveable caches had just been planted in the area, so some of these were downloaded to the GPS. This meant we could check that Kirby was there, collect some more and get in a walk and a stop in Lansdowne Crescent for a coffee. To top that off the day was very pleasantly sunny. Leaving the car near Fielding Drive we were quickly up to the frog ponds on Knocklofty and found that Kirby was in fact at home. Kirby’s hiding place From there it was a short distance to “ Leaps the Frog ” and “ Freddo ” which were both quickly located. “ Woodleigh Gnome ” had been down as one to collect when he was at the Waterworks, but someone beat us, and he was one of those dropped off here. This was more of a challenge as it was up through the bush and when the GPS settled down a suspicious ...

Friday 22 June 2012 It was a nice sunny, if quite cold day, and we decided to go for a walk in the suburb of Dynnyrne and collect a geocache “ Log Cabin ” on the way. At first we went up the wrong street in attempting to locate the underpass of the Southern Outlet highway, but eventually found it and Sue worked out the cache location quite quickly.   A schoolgirl muggle appeared just before we had time to return the container, but had it back soon after.  A walk further up the hill brought us past various architecture style of houses; with the most unusual one being a replica of a castle.   Beyond this was a walkway to Tolmans Hill and for somewhere high above the highway it was amazingly noisy from the traffic.

20 June 2012 A bushwalk to the top of Collins Cap was in the plan for the day, with a couple of caches to hopefully be the bonus. On the way up we had a quick search for Myrtle Park, but didn’t latch on to it and left finding it until the return leg. As we got high frozen snow on bushes was met and as planned we went down part of the old Glen Dhu track before seeing if an ascent of Collins Capo could be made from that side of the mountain. However the snow on the bushes was going to make us a bit too wet, so it was back to the track and the normal way up. It did not take us long to discover that it was quite overgrown with very wet chest high scrub which caused us to give up on the attempt. There were four of us on the walk and on returning to the “ Myrtle Park ” cache site all began the search based on the hint. Greg managed to find it fairly quickly. The log was interesting in that two entries were made by people who wrote they knew nothing about geocaching, but spotted the cache c...