196 in a day.

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Wingaap
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Post by Wingaap » 16 December 07 9:50 am

Truly amazing!!!

shonkylogic
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Post by shonkylogic » 16 December 07 1:14 pm

Couldn't make it to lunch due to a meeting scheduled at the same time, but then had the pleasure of running into these blokes the same evening by pure coincidence whilst out at a work dinner function. Glad I got to meet you and congratulations on your achievement. But it's never about the numbers :lol:

dak's Emu Mob
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Post by dak's Emu Mob » 16 December 07 4:32 pm

As someone who has helped plan and execute one of these cache raids, I can really appreciate the effort that is necessary to pull it off. Congratulations!
<p>
Was it a midnight to midnight raid? In other words, were the caches logged on the same date?
<p>
The really interesting thing about this raid is that BearLeft stayed in the van! With almost 200 cache logs up for grabs, he can truly state that "it's not about the numbers"!
<p>
Cheers,
<p>
dak

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setsujoku
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Post by setsujoku » 16 December 07 5:20 pm

dak's Emu Mob wrote:As someone who has helped plan and execute one of these cache raids, I can really appreciate the effort that is necessary to pull it off. Congratulations!
<p>
Was it a midnight to midnight raid? In other words, were the caches logged on the same date?
<p>
The really interesting thing about this raid is that BearLeft stayed in the van! With almost 200 cache logs up for grabs, he can truly state that "it's not about the numbers"!
<p>
Cheers,
<p>
dak
was a 12pm to 12pm raid, which i guess in some ways is probably the better way to do it when you need the energy to keep going right through.

rather than not getting any sleep before you start out on it, this way you can start nice and fresh

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Papa Bear_Left
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Post by Papa Bear_Left » 16 December 07 5:49 pm

Midnight to midnight, which was neat but not ideal for fatigue...

We tried sleeping in the late afternoon/evening, but not many of us actually got any real sleep, I think. (I slipped out to catch up on cache reviewing for a couple of hours, for example)

So, like most of the others, I had a 40+ hour day by the time we got back to the digs. Adreneline (and a sugar-free Red Bull) is a wonderful thing!

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pprass
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Post by pprass » 16 December 07 10:29 pm

We were caching around Ballarat yesterday and noticed that the NZ assault team had gone through the area. We were literally following in their footsteps from one end of Ballarat to the other. Must have missed them by a few hours.

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Post by Moneydork » 22 December 07 12:09 pm

:oops: Turns out that it was 195 rather than 196 caches (we have re-counted them after some sleep).

Some stats follow (probably records for the time to this number of finds)
10 caches - 0 hours, 43 minutes
25 caches - 1 hour, 55 minutes
50 caches - 3 hours, 53 minutes
100 caches - 11 hours, 07 minutes
Old record (128 caches) achieved in 14 hours, 29 minutes
150 caches - 18 hours, 05 minutes
195 caches - 23 hours, 51 minutes

We may have also inadvertently set records for the fastest 200, 300, 400 and 500 caches in Aussie during the trip. We'll need to work that all out after the caches have all been logged.

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Alansee
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Post by Alansee » 24 December 07 11:28 am

As someone who has done a few caches, but is highly unlikely to ever set any records, I think that this was an amazing feat. :o Well done guys. :D Having followed in the wake of the NZ guys I can verify quite a numberof their finds! And how they did it.

However I will suggest that if records are going to be claiimed, the circumstances under which such records are claimed do need to be spelt out. Did they do the driving? Did they all go to each cache? Did they all sign the log? etc. Otherwise any record claims become a bit academic. :wink:

Or should we set up a set of rules under which any such records are to be controlled? Perhaps we need to. Otherwise any record attempts will also depend on the techniques used and will not be really comparable.

Ultimately though, the most important thing is - Did they have fun? It certainly sounds like it - and that after all is the point of this game. :D :D :D :D :D

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Zytheran
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Post by Zytheran » 24 December 07 11:47 am

Congratulations!
As I have said all along, Adelaide is the place where big records will be set. The city is big enough with enough caches and driving around is pretty easy compared to other cities. The road layout on a grid with radial feeders and no freeways to really get in the way helps to.
It would be nice to see what software they used (assuing GSAK) and what they used for route planning optimisation and whether a route (or routes with options?) was loaded into a GPSr.

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Re: 196 in a day.

Post by Moneydork » 24 December 07 11:50 am

If you follow the link in the first post to this thread you'll find the rules that apply to the record that we're claiming.

http://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/Caching_record

We had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed every cache we visited (DNF's included) - though I can't claim to remember each individual cache now.
It was a great challenge and we ourselves are surprised at what we managed to achieve.

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Alansee
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Post by Alansee » 24 December 07 12:16 pm

Thanks Monkeydork - I'm not surprised that it was somewhere!

Moneydork
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Post by Moneydork » 24 December 07 12:25 pm

Zytheran wrote:Congratulations!
As I have said all along, Adelaide is the place where big records will be set. The city is big enough with enough caches and driving around is pretty easy compared to other cities. The road layout on a grid with radial feeders and no freeways to really get in the way helps to.
It would be nice to see what software they used (assuing GSAK) and what they used for route planning optimisation and whether a route (or routes with options?) was loaded into a GPSr.
Adelaide truly is a great city for this sort of thing - and I have to say it was one of the tidier (less rubbish, graffiti, etc) major cities that I've cached in for a while - with some great parks and beaches to enjoy on the way.

Route planning was left to two of us to sort - Zorgon and I.
GSAK was used as tool for cache planning (filtering caches by the number of recent DNFs, distance from logical parking spots, etc), with Zorgon doing detailed planning and cache filtering.

I came up with an initial route through the CBD manually - about 40 caches in something like 14 kms of driving. We treated it as a separate mission to the rest of the city, with a lot of debate about whether or not we should skip the inner city due to traffic and muggle concerns and what time of the day or night was best to target it for.
(In the end we just couldn't ignore the cache density in the inner city).

Zorgon used a set of auto-routing maps to optomise a route around the rest of the city and I then manually reviewed the optimised plan, debating pros and cons of different options and making changes with him, with a number of tweaks made as a result.

This was a challenge in itself when he lives in Auckland and I live about 1000kms away in the South Island - we'd never even met one-another until we all met up in Melbourne at the start of our trip.

Caches were added or removed from the route up to about 12 hours before the start of the attempt, with Zorgon assuming overall responsibility for route planning.

One person (myself) was elected to be navigator for the day, with responsibility for any route changes - but I only really had the one route planned out, with the option of perhaps changing the order in which we visited each suburb.
We added in some of the caches that had been eliminated earlier on the day, however, about 5 of the caches that I added in on the day were DNFs, suggesting that we'd have been better off if I didn't vary from the original plan.

I'll let other team members add more detail if they wish - but we don't want to share too much in order to protect our record.

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Mr Router
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Post by Mr Router » 24 December 07 12:33 pm

Moneydork wrote:I'll let other team members add more detail if they wish - but we don't want to share too much in order to protect our record.
You have entered enough :lol: :wink:

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Papa Bear_Left
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Post by Papa Bear_Left » 24 December 07 2:07 pm

We had all the cache and, more importantly, parking spots loaded into a street-directory GPSr (not a handheld, geocaching one. I forget the brand, but it wasn't TomTom. Navman, I think?)

While the assault team piled out to find each cache (almost always one per parking spot; it was quicker to drive even a few hundred metres than it was to walk between them), I'd select the next cache on the printed-out list as the next waypoint to navigate to, and turn the van around, etc. if required. Given the speed with which almost caches were found, there wasn't time for much else!

I mostly followed the GPSr directions, even though there were a couple of points at which the map was out of date and led us a little astray.
The few moments of tension (and there were remarkably few, given the fatigue and pressure) really only came when there were conflicting instructions from the passenger seat and the dashboard.

Everybody in the team at least had the chance to be the finder of every cache, although the last out of the van was often still on the way to GZ when everyone else was coming back while the log was being stickered!

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Post by the.pud » 24 December 07 2:33 pm

Papa Bear_Left wrote:Everybody in the team at least had the chance to be the finder of every cache, although the last out of the van was often still on the way to GZ when everyone else was coming back while the log was being stickered!
That would have been me :lol: :lol: I had the job of reading the instuctions for the next cache.

So I was laways last out and tried to be first back into the van, so to give me time to have a quick scan before annoucing the info to the rest of the team.

I saying that I still managed to find three caches in a row, and did poke some fun at the others as to what they were doing here and "please pick up your game boys"

And yes it was GREAT fun also, I would do it again.....maybe another Oz caching record could soon fall to the NZers??

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