25 Jul 2011

Rum Coffee and A Flash

821

It's been a busy old week, with not a lot of geocaches found! Having said that there is a lot to get through.


Arrrarggghhhhhh

Rum

A pirates favourite drink! Wemnog and I attended our first Piratemania event over the weekend. Not having attended any previous ones we were unsure what to expect, apart from a lot of fun. http://coord.info/GC2NYZG Sadly we couldn't camp for the weekend so attended as day visitors on the Saturday. We arrived at the event to be greeted by some extremely friendly pirates, parrots and some cabin dogs. Although we didn't do much caching it was great to meet up with a load of fellow cachers, some familiar faces and to make lots of new friends. We missed out on a few as well though who were busy finding all the new caches that had been put out for the weekend.
There are loads of photos available and even some videos.



Warrington Cacher and Walkerclan flags
The campsite itself was an amazing sight, with flags flying everywhere, we saw Jolly Roger's, team flags, forum flags and personal tracking flags. Next year we will definately attend for the whole weekend. Congratulations must be given to the organisers who were very pleased to be able to announce that the event had had enough visitors to make it a MEGA event. All in all a brilliant weekend and the first MEGA that I have attended. I can't wait to see what the souvenir looks like.



On car and flag TB's alone we logged over 50 discovered's!

There was even a real pirates parrot attending!


Captain's Parrot







Flash

Although we couldn't stay overnight we did pop back over to the event again on the Sunday to drop some more TB's off for people to move on. We were also passing as we were on our way to Ashbourne to attend the final bit of Piratemania, a flash mob in the main square in Ashbourne.  Pointy Pirates FM http://coord.info/GC2ZQB6 consisted of a huge number of cachers meeting up and on the sound of the horn pointing skywards with a lot of suitable arrrrhaaarring! There were plenty of bemused muggles around wondering what the hell a load of people dressed as pirates and some dressed as landlubbers were pointing at. The flash mob video is above. 


Gathering For The Flash Mob




Coffee

After the flash mob ended it was time to head over to Sheffield to another event, Coffee & Caching http://coord.info/GC2Z8MN we arrived and couldn't find anyone in the designated spot. I did have the phone number of a fairly new geocacher Tank 0115 who had also decided to attend from Nottingham. I phoned him and we met up and had our coffee and a long chat about geocaching. Still no one turned up, very strange. Then just as Tank 0115 was about to leave another couple asked if we were geocachers so we had a chat with them. As we were about to leave the organiser of the event turned up, now 2 hours later than the planned start. Unfortunately we had to leave quite soon so after signing the logbook and swapping trackables we headed home.

On arriving home and logging the event we noticed that the organiser had posted a note at the last minute saying that he had altered the time from 1.30pm to 3.30pm, not very helpful when people had travelled some distance and didn't have any way of reading late notifications.

Caches

As I said, not many actual cache finds this week. We intend going back to do the Piratemania caches in the next couple of weeks, and there are plenty to do which we are really looking forward to.

Earlier in the week we did find Henry (The Iron Man) http://coord.info/GC1PPEC which was a great little cache not far from Sheffield City Centre. The statue isn't actually at GZ but was quite a sculpture to look at.


Henry (The Iron Man)
Another find was Lamins of Shearsby. A cache in a churchyard. You don't find many of those around these days. This was placed well before the rules regarding consecrated ground came in and was put out back in 2004 http://coord.info/GCKNZ6 The only other notable find of the week was on of old caching friends Fly2live2fly. Over in Bruntingthorpe Steve's Aviation Cache #1 Bruntingthope Vulcan http://coord.info/GC1KVBB was a quick find after dropping some cars off at the nearby airfield. I would have loved to take some photos of all the planes but sadly photography wasn't allowed.


Other News

I had planned to tell you a lot of other news this week but think you will be getting bored if I go on too much, so as promised last week,

Have you ever had one of your caches muggled? You know the feeling, frustration, anger etc. etc. A bunch of German cachers were having their placements muggled frequently. So much so that they decided to band together. What they discovered was that it was the same person doing the muggling. Rather than me going in to too much detail on the blog, have a look at this. http://sonntagsrudel.amshove.net/ There is a link on there to an English version for you to read.

Photographs

If you enjoy taking photographs when you are out caching and they end up just getting stored on your computer once you are home, why not think about sharing them online?

I have been using a site called Daily Booth for a while. This used to be just for my own photos. I have now shut that down and started again, using it just for geocaching photos. It would be great if we could get a bunch of cachers from around the world joining up to post their caching adventures online. If you don't have the time or inclination to write a blog it is a great way of showing others what you have been up to. You can find my booth at http://dailybooth.com/JacaruGeocaching/17584569 It may be called Daily Booth, but there isn't a stipulation that you have to put a photograph on there daily. You can follow people, just as with Facebook or Twitter. Let me know if you decide to join and I will start following you.

N2N

More entries have been arriving for the race, we now have 14 UK entries so far and 11 US entries with more promised. With just over a month to go I am really pleased with the way this has taken off. If you haven't entered but still wish to do so, don't forget to let me have your TB as soon as you can.

Next Week ~ Our Top 10 Caching Bag Essentials.

Happy caching.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Piratemania looks very fun! I don't know why I didn't book us up to go. I think it'll be a must next year. We are going to the MEGA Wales at the weekend, but having an excuse to dress up as a pirate would have been much better! ;) Henry, the Iron Man looks fun! Will remember that for when were up that way.