Geocaching

I was sitting at home working, I had just finished something that I had been working on for awhile when I got an email from Geocaching.com telling me that a new cache had been placed in Alameda. I was ready for a break and wanted to get out of the house for awhile and I am always up for trying to get a first to find so I packed up my stuff and headed out.

When I arrived at the posted parking spot for the cache I saw a pickup truck that had a geocaching sticker on it so I figured I was out of luck as far as getting a first to find. I hopped out of the car and headed to the cache area.

This was a nine stage multi-cache. Thankfully, it sounds much worse than it really is. All of the stages are very close together. This is actually a pretty clever cache, the location is an old campground, each of the different stages brings you to a zone of the campground and these zones are numbered. So you go to each stage of and get the number and then at the end you figure out a pretty basic puzzle using these numbers and get the final stage location.

When I first arrived on the scene I saw a man with a young boy wondering around and I made the assumption that they were fellow cachers and I figured they were the owners of the truck with the Geocaching sticker on it. I called out to them and said “What stage are you guys on?” the man looked at me like I was off my rocker and I quickly just tried to move on and forget that I made an ass out of myself.

I went to all of the different stages collecting the information that I needed and then sat down to figure out the puzzle. I ran into a bit of a problem at this point. Either GSAK or Cachemate screwed up when it exported the cache info to my Treo. The puzzle page has this line on it: Cache is located at AEIBFIC CDGHBA for whatever reason my Treo just said: Cache is located at AEIBFIC. I was pretty sure I was doing the puzzle correctly as with the fragment that I did have I was able to get the North/South coordinate but I couldn’t figure out the East/West coordinate. I tried just walking along the north/south line but that didn’t work (It would have if I had looked harder though). I ended up sitting down and puzzling over it, I didn’t know at the time that I was missing part of the puzzle, yes I had my suspicions, but I didn’t know for sure.

As I was sitting the man with the young boy approached me, I got ready to explain the whole Geocaching thing as you find yourself doing that a lot in this sport but then he surprised me. It turned out that it was the owner of the cache. When it went live he and his son came down to see if they could witness the first to find. We talked about the puzzle and I showed him what was going on and he confirmed my suspicions that I was missing some of the information. He really helped me out here, he called his house and had his daughter go online and check the cache page and then she gave me the rest of the puzzle. With the rest in hand I was able to quickly figure out the east/west coords and shortly after that I found the cache and best of all I was the first person to find it. There is nothing quite like finding a virgin logbook.

After signing the log book I spent a while talking with gcherry talking about geocaching and some of the cool stuff we had found. It was actually kind of funny, we had found a quite a few of his caches on 8/5/2007 on our marathon caching day. In fact I had actually emailed him regarding one of his caches. We ended up talking for probably 20 minutes and had a good time doing so.

I considered going for a couple more caches but I decided to just call it a day and headed home.