A long long way from home

After some deliberation I have finally decided to make all my caches of size “small” and larger Premium Only, or only accessible to paid memberships on geocaching.com.

Why?

Groundspeak have geocaching apps for iPhone and Android that doesn’t require the cacher to have a login name at geocaching.com. Anyone that can install the “Geocaching Intro” iPhone app may as a result find my caches, potentially destroy their hiding place and take any TBs and coins out of the box for their keeping. With the increased mainstream interest in geocaching I am seeing this as an upcoming larger problem.

Some people say “The risk for those things to happen are close to zero”. Not really. I had a cache hidden in a stone wall where an iPhone cacher tore down half the wall to get to the cache, and he never put the stones back in place. I have had trackables suddenly disappear from caches, once by one noob cacher that actually had a login and stated in the log for the cache that he had retrieved my coin. That cacher only logged four caches, and my coin is gone.

I am getting tired of this, and since there is no mechanism for consistently confirming finds or for marking a cache “visible only to cachers with 300 confirmed finds” I am now relying on that one indicator showing a persons interest and dedication for geocaching: A paid membership.

Unfortunately, this approach has one serious flaw, which I am prepared to overlook. Families where one of the parents have a premium account and the spouse and all the children have free accounts will not be able to have the spouse and kids log my caches any more. I can see that this is irritating, but one has to blame Groundspeaks policy for forcing cache owners into doing this. I wish it wasn’t so.

So, as of today, all caches I own that are big enough to put trackables in them will be for Premium Members only. Micros and nanos will still be available to unregistered cachers and those with an unpaid membership.

Yesterday at 23:00 I discovered that the cache “The middle of somewhere” was published at 16:16, and that noone had found it, or at least had not posted any FTF (First To Find) logs on geocaching.com. This is a mystery cache, and I had to recall my old geometry skillz from school to be able to calculate the coordinates. Then I downloaded a free GPS waypoint finder program for my iPhone, plotted the coordinates in and went to bed.

This morning the first thing I did was check my mail to see if there had been any finders of this cache. It was nothing there, but I was a bit worried that one of the other regular FTF hunters I know had found it but not logged it on the website so that other FTF hunters would come rushing to the scene just to be disappointed by finding a not-so-much pristine log sheet in the container. A despicable practice, that.

However, after dropping the kid off to kindergarten and the wife off to work I went down to see if I got my calculations right. And after some detours – the iPhone GPS isn’t all that.. – I had to use the hint to start bruteforcing possible cache locations. And I found it! And it was an FTF! There was much rejoicing, and then I went to work

Wondering about the picture? Well, little Halden seems to be a dangerous town, that’s a bullet hole in a sign near the cache!