Craziest caching capers ???

[Team Piggy]

Lets hear it ? What Crazy Stupid things have you got up to whilst caching.<br>Things that you now look at and Cringe or Laugh ! or just plain wonder... <br>Pictures could be funny in this topic I suspect..

[Slider & Smurf]

I'll kick off ...<br>
<br>
Lleyton's Gates, sometime last year ... after figuring out the original coordinates had been displaced by a minute in latitude, Slider & Smurf with Maccamob in tow (back in the dim dark days when they had less than 50 finds!!) set off to claim the virgin. Found sites #1 and #3 easily enough, but without finding #2 we couldn't solve the puzzle to lead us to the final cache location. Sent an email to Freddo, the cache owner, and resigned ourselves to continuing the search another day ... not everyone is glued to the internet like we are, so we didn't expect an answer that day.<br>
<br>
Lo & behold, later that evening we received a reply with the crucial hint. Hey, it was only about 9pm - anyone up for a spot of night caching?! MaccaMum was keen, poor MaccaDad and Slider rolled their eyes and headed to the cache mobile.<br>
<br>
Thankfully this was pre-Sept. 11, as the sight of four adults scouring the final location (thoughtfully lit up with spotlights by the local facilities!) would probably raise a few more eyebrows from passing motorists today. But at the time we felt rather conspicuous, and kept looking over each other's shoulders in case we were sprung!<br>
<br>
From memory, this was MaccaMob's first "first find" ... if only we could keep up! Our first night cache (even if it was lit up like daylight) and a bloody good night out

[invaders]

at skeleton key we fond every single answer within a flash, except for the king william clue. In total we spent about 2 and a half hours looking for just that one grave and were constantly swooped by a magpie who was hiding in the tree above. Finally we found it and were released from the curse.

[EcoTeam]

Doing i!5 we almost got busted trying to climb over the wall of Kirribilly House, only a few days after Sept 11... Could have been the first geocachers shot or in jail!


Doing "The Division Bell", climbed Mount Bell (which has a metal trig point on the top) in the middle of a bad lightning storm. Crossing the road to go up, a nearby lighting stike almost knocked us off our feet. We foolishly continued and survived to tell the tale.


Doing Claustral Canyon when unbeknown to us Blocko and Badger placed the "Claustrophobia" cache about 5m above our heads! Not a crazy caching story perhaps, but it's worth telling. Anyone else been accidently present when someone was planting a cache?

[Hounddog]

One of the craziest things to happen to me was when I found myself searching for a cache in some of the densest most horrible vegetation you could imagine. I got all scratched up and frustrated after about 2 hours of searching only to find that I had programmed the wrong co-ords into the GPS. Funny thing was, the clues all matched up with the terrain even down to a rock ledge and a waterfall nearby. When I finally woke up and went searching in the right place (about 2km away) the similarity was startling, what are the odds of that. Have you ever noticed that when you do put in the wrong co-ords it never seems to take you to a place that is obviously wrong from the start.

Hounddog

[ideology]

ecoteam, what about your adventures with the security guards at luna park?

we trashed the original gearbox on the original cachemobile by doing too many 4wd geo-tracks. oops!

we hired a limo to take us caching around adelaide... the driver was a little upset when he saw the dirt and mud in the passenger compartment. going through the mcdonald's drive through was fun!

we were kicked out of the university of NSW by security guards

plus a few more "adventures" which we care not to remember

[The Rats]

I've got a few funny stories, The best happened in my very early caching days. I was doing 'Drop dead gorgeous' which requires you to abseil down to a rock ledge where an abandon car sits wedged on the ledge. Well this was right up the Rats alley - abseiling and the like. Once at the car I hunted high and low for the cache, in the boot, inside the car, under the car, everywhere. I noticed that the car was full of mud and thought since we'd just had a heap of rain that the cache had been washed away. So in good tradition I left a note for the next finder explaining what i thought had happened. Anyway I prussiked back to the top where Mrs Rat was keen to hear about my adventure, but there was little joy. We packed up and headed home a little dejected. We emailed 2 Dogs to tell them how their cache was no longer there and it should be archived. How small did we feel when they asked us "did we look in the glove box". Anyway it was a fews weeks later that we went back and claimed the find.

[swampgecko]

Well, where do I begin?
Most of the long playing Sydney based GeoCachers know who I work for, so for the rest of the forum readers, I work on aircraft and for the federal government wearing a blue uniform. Anyway I left work and headed of to do Dealer wins in my uniform. At one way point which is a main city water supply pipe, I am on my hands and kneeslooking under it, when this bloke approaches me and asks what I am doing.. So I just casually explain that I am looking for Leaks, and I am with Sydney Water . He bought it and wandered off. Just as a side issue I was looking for a leek, the cache setters were Leek and Mind Socket so I suppose I told the truth......

And there are more like that, just for Dealer wins, but I wont't bore you with them now.........

[SNIFTER]

Where do I start. I have had some truly funny times whilst geocaching and the first one has to be the time I went looking for "Bullseye". With only half an hour to spare I ducked into the park and was confronted with bush....lots of bush...you know the prickly sort. I thought it would be a push over being so close to home etc.....WRONG. On my second visit to the area I gave myself plenty of time and did the geocaching circles and lo and behold there it was. And you are all thinking what is so funny. Hounddog was there of course searching as a 6 foot person can do. Me being 5 foot saw it low to the ground and knowing that it was a virgin and a first virgin for me I let out the most almighty scream, started jumpimg up and down and generaly making the loudest noise I could. Poor Hounddog just about had a heart attack as he thought I had been bitten by a snake. I was just so happy to make the find and I will never forget it.
Other ones that come to mind include "Metro" I laughed all the way home from that one after looking in all the Hyde Park drains for a "carbon rod". The other noteable one was "Twister". My bounty at that one was a snow dome with the pictures of Ideology in it.
I have had many encounters with local yocals while I have been sitting in the car waiting for Hounddog. "How dare I go into the bush" "What are you doing here" "You can't go there" and many more questions.
I am sure that I will think of a few more and when I do I will share the same with you all.

[The Ginger Loon]

We've had some pretty amazing adventeres as well. Probably the most memorable was for a very early cache called "A Wise Mans Folly", which was a multi cache around a walking trail north of Wisemans Ferry. The cache setter stuffed up the co-ords to the 2nd waypoint, leading myself, the Capt. & Y2C on a wild goose chase nearly 2 kilometers in the opposite direction to where the WP really was. Once we got to "GZ" and had a look around we realised there was an error so we decided to bail, but instead of backtracking to WP1 and then the car we decided to make a bee line straight to the car, little realising there was a mosquito infested, fetid smelling bog between us and the vehicle. By the time we got back to the car we were all covered in this stuff and Y2C wasn't too keeen to let us in...
<br /><br />
Pretty funny to look back on but at the time we could've killed the cache setter...
<br /><br />
The other memorable one was <a href="http://teamchaos.geocaching.com.au/cach ... 64">Turtle Nest 1</a>, where we stuffed up one of the clues with the resultant co-ords leading us to a cat in a laneway at Coogee...

[SNIFTER]

Would you like the full name and address of the setter.

Turtle nest took me to a block of units on the steepest part of Arden St Coogee and had me hunting in wandering jewand gas boxes.
Between the tunnels had us in the Newnes Valley just 3 kms from the cache site but to get there it was a 140 km back track to get there.

[The Ginger Loon]

Turtle nest took me to a block of units on the steepest part of Arden St Coogee

<br /><br />
That's where we saw the cache cat!!!

[EcoTeam]

Ah yes, how could I forget the guards at Luna park, part of the original Get Smart cache.
There was a camera trained right at GZ, and security had watched many cachers coming and going into the bushes of what turned out to be private property owned by the Luna park trust. We got "busted" by one of the guards on his way home, and politely told him to mind his own business as it was public land. Off he went in a huff knowing he couldn't do a thing. But sure enough he went back and checked it was in fact private land, and they were ready to bust another team the next day, which they did and threatened to call the police.

Also, how could I forget completely writing off our new Cachemobile while up the north coast doing a bunch of caches. 4WD's with re-inforced bullbars can do some major damage! Luckily there was no injury, but the car was a write-off. Can anybody beat $28000 worth of damage while caching?? We had to take the train home along with our picnic basket - bummer. It was insured though, we now have a shiny new EcoMobile along with a new insurance company...

EcoDave

[Team Galaxyquest]

Our first caper was a doosy!
it was around 10:30pm and we were attempting to find Easy Degrees, needless to say we had just come back from a full day of caching and had all of our equipment on. We didnt know it at the time but the Flinders University security guards had seen us drive into the uni and had obviously followed us around near the cache's location. The problem was it was almost 11pm by now and we had an amazing array of equipment on. We were packing heavy duty hiking boots, a set of garmin Rino 120's which were on and revieveing updates for our team mate in the car (loud radio squelch and tone tags sound very high tech [and mean trouble for security]), we had black Camelbak TransFormer military grade hydration packs on, a giant maglite, and beanies!!!! (in retrospect i can imagine we would have looked fairly dusty and tired too)
The rino reported that we were about 40m from the cache when we heard "STOP" "HOLD IT THERE GUYS". There were 3 BIG security guards, they too had Maglites and didn't seem afraid to use them!!!! we told them what was going on but they wouldnt have a bar of it! they took our details and escorted us off the campus!

Not a plesant expirence at all! luckily they didnt ask for physical ID, they just asked us for our names and addresses. (false one work a treat)

we had a 2 week break from caching after that...

we only wear our camelbaks during they day now

Jono (Team GalaxyQuest)

[pyrenees kid]

Night On Bald Mountain<br>
Told by Biggles Bear.<br><br>Unlike the images conjured in Fantasia, to accompany the music of Moussorsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain”, we were not assailed by spooks, spectres or ghosts. Although I dare say there may have been some amongst us who might have found that more preferable to the event that we are about to recount. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

It all started after dinner on Friday night; A voice in the crowd asked, "Anyone up for a night-time cache?" and of course there was a chorus of "Yes!” So, the four 4WDs set off with everyone onboard (14 caching enthusiasts) EMBI, The Wanderers, Maccamob, JoMac, Biggles Bear, Team Frogger (X3), Geofreak, Jedi4. It was still daylight when we began but it is quite a distance from base camp so it was well dark by the time we reached a fallen tree barred our path. After a little discussion and a quick straw poll the log was soon removed and once again we were on our way. Of course all of this has been recorded on the two digi video cams. After the success of this first conquest and the lure of a virgin cache the troops were feeling quite buoyed. So when we reached the track junction leading to the cache the precipitous nature of the track was not considered to be a reason not to reach our target. The Wanderers in the GeoChallenger set out on a reconnaissance mission and with all reports via the walkie talkie being positive Biggles Bear followed in the Biggles Mobile (The fact that the cache was 3KM away was just too enticing). At this point the more sensible amongst us opted out and headed back to camp. Victory was sweet for those brave (fool hardy) souls when the cache was finally located at 9.45 PM. After much rejoicing and photo taking the interid travellers headed for home with the GeoChallenger in the lead and Biggles Mobile following. Then a message from GeoChallenger to BB via the walkie talkie was the introduction to the real adventure of the night! "Just stop there I'm gonna need a run up" So Biggles Bear hung back whilst the GeoChallenger made a series of runs and eventually, after letting some air out of the tyres, made it! The ground was now looking somewhat different from the journey in; moist smooth black soil was now exposed instead of the light cover of vegetation prior to the GeoChallenger’s wheel spins. Biggles Bear was up for a challenge but after four attempts it was clear that the only outcome was a deterioration in the track surface. The real scary bit for Biggles Bear #2 was the stall and reverse start procedure, in the dark and on a narrow track with substantial vegetation either side. At one point a tree hit the rear vision mirror (or is it the other way around?) and Biggles Bear expected to see some panel damage. But no, Biggles Bear #1 avoided this. So a plan was hatched, BB would stay the night with the vehicle and the others would return in the morning with some recovery gear (not having recovery gear was one of a few oversights).

Next morning after a few uncomfortable hours in the vehicle Biggles Bear surveyed the scene with the assistance of daylight. Some discussion took place as to whether the vehicle could be driven out unassisted, but we waited for the support crew. They arrived (The Wanders, EMBI, Maccamob and Jedi4 [one part of Jedi4 at any rate] ) about 9.30 with coffee, fruit, water and of course camera gear. The footage will reveal the happy ending, Biggles Bear was able to drive out unassisted. A few hours of sunlight had dried the ground out just enough to give some traction. So a happy ending and an adventure for all.<br>

Follow thew link to see a short MPEG of the successful escape.<br>


note: 1.3Mb for you dailup people<br>
http://members.iinet.net.au/~djock/pich ... eshill.MPG