Tangling With The Devil!

1186

47 caches on since the last blog. With the long weekend of Easter we were lucky enough to have some time to spend on caching.

Not wanting to travel too far because of the usual bank holiday busy roads and also the ridiculous amount that diesel is costing at the moment, plus the fact that we haven't got any of our own bio diesel ready we were pleased on Good Friday when a new series was published that was only a couple of miles from home.

The Ron's Round (RR) series by GOGMT and R ambler took us on a two and a half mile walk which took in walking through peoples gardens (yes it was allowed) and an airfield. Again, the airfield had a public footpath so again totally within Groundspeak rules. http://coord.info/GC3G43W  The series had a nice varied collection of containers and a couple of hides that took a little bit of working out, mainly the first and the tenth.

Not quite ready for takeoff

Easter Sunday saw a tease come out on our local Facebook book page GeM https://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#!/groups/137568269677358/ asking who was going to be up early on Easter Monday ready to go caching. With no more than that from our local pair NottsPenny and her husband mono78v it was left to us to set the alarm and wait.

Sure enough the first notification came through at 7.00am in the morning. The next trickled through at 7.30am and then 8.00am. We knew that with previous caches set by these two that we were in for a fun time. Armed with GPS, dogs and smart phones we set off for the first in the series. The CS Code series, here's a link to number one http://coord.info/GC3GDZ7 was again nice and local to us, in fact it tied in nicely with the RR series and both could actually be done at the same time taking in a figure of 8.

Arriving at GZ we saw a couple of familiar faces searching for the first cache, fly2live2fly pair Barbara and Steve were already well ahead in searching for the first. As we joined the search we realised that we may be in for a tough time. After some while they decided to leave us searching for it whilst they headed off for number 2.

Wemnog with fly2live2fly

A little while later we were chuffed to find the container and once we had signed the logbook as FTF's we headed off to number 2. We were again surprised to find that Barbara and Steve were still at GZ not having much luck. Between four of us searching and the coords pointing all units to one place we still couldn't find the container. By this time the phones had already pinged up the next couple in the series. With heavy hearts we resorted to a PAF to the owners and armed with the information needed we still took some time to locate this difficult one.

I was pleased to note however that it wasn't just us who had difficulty with this one and cachers throughout the day and subsequent few days also struggled. So much so that Penny has now upped the difficulty rating on it.

At this point it seemed reasonable for the four of us to team up to continue the series. Our success rate continued and we got 11 out of the 12 FTF's on them. Why not 12? We met up with Eviepops who had seen our log on number 1 and decided to try and nab a few FTF's by doing some of the series from the opposite direction.

The notifications popped up every half hour and by the time we had got to number 9 we were up to date and hanging around for the next one to come through. By the time we got to number 11 the rain had started but it wasn't going to put any of us off. Number 11 in this series is by far the most challenging and certainly had 3 of us laughing whilst poor old Keith had the task of retrieving the container. I didn't know that anyone could get quite that intimate with a tree!

Armed with all the clues needed for the bonus cache it was time to retreat to work things out. Now here was a twist. Without giving anything away I will say that we were unable to complete the bonus without some additional research and had to abandon the search until later in the day. Sadly by the time we had the coordinates worked out Barbara and Steve weren't able to join us to go and retrieve it. So one shiny new logbook later and an FTF prize of a new TB we were really pleased with our day out.
One week later and the four of us are still the only ones to find the final, although the rest of the series has been found by quite a few people.

Our final series came a couple of days ago, a bit further afield this time we decided to attempt The Bonhams SC series, a nice simple set of 16 caches that only took a couple of hours to complete. We had mixed weather but a very pleasant walk. The views were good as well. Rape is just beginning to flower in the fields adding some colour to our walk as well.

The dogs have certainly been enjoying the extra walking that we have been doing and, I think that the final walk has given me the next collie TB to boot.

The next collie TB?

Tor gets the log!

One cache that has been getting all the locals going over the last couple of weeks is Devilishly Difficult ? by our friends stormjak and MFB Tracker. This cache isn't for the faint hearted and has had numerous visits from lots of the local dignitaries searching in vain for it. In fact it took an extra clue before it was finally found. http://coord.info/GC3FVZW  I am embarrassed to admit that we have now visited three times and are still no further on with finding it, and yes, we do know what we are looking for! At the time of writing this blog it has only four finds on it with an amazing 16 DNF's. It is certainly driving people around here potty.

Speaking of stormjak and MFB, we joined forces with them to put a new cache out at the beginning of April. 'Ouse Dyke Is It? is a fun cache for people to do with a D rating of 2.5 but a T rating of 5. We put it out under the caching name StormtracarunoG. So far it has had 6 visits and 5 favourites on it. We are really pleased with this one and all of us look forward to reading the logs for it. http://coord.info/GC3FZ4Z 

That's it for now. We are planning on doing another local series this morning, just to start the week off nicely before we have to think about doing some work. Have a good caching time everyone, until next time.