Geocaching

Friday , 22 November 2013 It was predicted to be quite raining today and were rugged up in anticipation. However it proved to be a sunny and warm day and it seemed a good time to finish off the remaining caches in the Kalang area. Peter had been there earlier in the month whilst doing some Bushcare work, but forgot to take the calculations needed to locate the caches. Kalang Kaleidoscope - Final (KK 07) Finally finished this hard to solve series. Took the Music TB The ants had taken a liking to the inside of this container cover at KK7 Not Ancient Ruins Well this was really tough to work out and Barad was pestered several times for help and still more help, which thankfully was readily given. Eventually Peter worked out to make use of the information provided and spent some time using visual basic to help get the answer. On arrival at the cache site it was apparent that nature had played a part in altering the hiding place. The container was visible and somewhat muddied by what h...

Saturday, 12 October 2013 Barad had mentioned that he had been chasing up drawings for some geocaches he was planning and soon after the CACC series began to get published. One look at the first one had Peter flummoxed but Sue made a suggestion stemming from the picture on the cache web site. This started the wheels in motion as we managed to solve it without too much nudging from Barad, but when the next two came up Peter was hopelessly lost and had to make repeated entreaties to Barad for help; which was willingly supplied. On the appointed search day we set off with Peter convinced in his own mind where the first 3 caches would be. However as CACC 1   was neared the GPS was insisting it was a good 150m off and Peter became convinced that he had copied a coord wrongly. So as it eventually was getting even further off, we switched to look for CACC 2 and found it was right where we were standing. Eventually we collected CACC 3   and headed back by a very steep old track. The...

Tuesday 25 December 2012 We decided to place a cache further up New Town Rivulet than the existing series owned by “Budgietas” but had a devil of a trouble finding a spot. The problem was making sure it was far enough away from existing ones, which can be complicated by mystery caches. The first attempt got was rejected but the mystery cache was one of those very hard ones, so we made some enquires before making the next effort to place only to get too close to another mystery one. After looking at the information on it Peter made an attempt to solve it. But if proved harder than he imagined. Solving it however would help establish how far our new cache had to be moved. The cache in question was “ Wellington to Lysander ”. On perusing the hint Peter remembered an earlier cache also from Barad Bunch that used the same code. With the earlier one quite a bit of help was needed from Barad and again with this one, after exhausting all the options within reason, Peter was unable to come up w...

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...

The final cache for the day was third time lucky for us, being Swimming Hole , which was finally found. Earlier in the afternoon we parked our car in Carlton Street outside the Jean-Pascal Patisserie enjoyed a coffee and a small Black Forest cake all of which passed muster easily. From there we walked down to Risdon Road to locate Don't get Muggled which had some intriguing log entries, including some that wondered how ever the cache could remain where it was without getting removed by a muggle. You do have to watch out for the passing traffic and our case, it was not just the cars that had to be contended with, but a couple with a young kid who walked past close to where we were we had moved to fill in the log. The bloke dropped his shopping including lot of bread rolls about a metre and half from us. If we hadn’t seen a similar type of daring hiding object before we may well have taken longer to find this one. From there it was off to Albert Road to find Total eclipse of ...

At this time of year the creek looks anything but inviting as a swimming pool, but finding a cache is an all year activity. It looked like trying to find the Swimming Hole cache might well take us all year too. On the second visit, see Frogs and Water for our first effort, we were confident after studying the past logs that we would spot something. But it was not to be and gave up after plenty of searching about, including inspecting an unlikely spot under a large storm water drainage pipe. We knew Barad Bunch had found it and sent out a “give us a hint request”. When Sue learnt of the hint she immediately thought of the bit of log she gave a kick to but thought “no that couldn’t be it”, but the news made her pretty suspicious that maybe it really was. On return for the third try proved quite quick, although Peter had to tug hard to open it. Although we waited for mugglers to depart, there was the owner of a nearby house doing repair work on his fence and gate, so we had to ...

We knew that " Swimming Hole " was a cache not far from home and finally decided to seek it. Earlier in the week we had picked up " Spot the Frog ", a moveable cache found under the Geocache Australia website and needed to deposit the little fellow somewhere. As frogs like water and this one had spent a few months on a dry hillside it seemed appropriate to lodge near a creek, so finding "Swimming Hole" was combined with the task. We could work out the starting spot even without a GPS and soon had the next stage entered in the GPS. Much to Peter's surprise it led us back down rather than up the creek and we ended beside a fence. A bit of searching and head scratching saw us give up for now and head off to lodge our little froggy. On return home Sue scanned through past logs and discovered several people also ended up where we did and then found this was several metres out. This has encouraged us to head back to the GZ soon and to ignore the GPS for on...