As we roll into a new year, we are forced towards the inevitable New Year’s Resolutions.  Lose some weight, exercise, work less, play more!  Arg. Last year, I tossed a few geocaching resolutions onto the list: Attend WWFM XI Make my 2000th find Continue my streak of at least one FTF a month Looking back over the year, all three were achieved, hooray! With the clock ticking down to the New Year, I am not sure of my resolutions for 2015, but I think the FTF streak will stay on the list. What are your resolutions for 2015?  Feel free to post them on the comments – I am still looking for inspiration        

Sometimes a night cache is unavoidable, such as my 3:15 am FTF.  Other times, we can choose to hunt down a geocache while basking in wonderful sunlight or attempt the find under the cover of darkness. Here is Night Caching Pro/Con list that I have come up with over the years: Day Pro: It’s light out! Night Con: It’s dark out!   Day Con: Muggles – lots of them. Night Pro: Muggles – all in bed by now.   Day Pro: Cache container easy to spot. Night Con: Cache containers may be hard to spot.   Day Con: Containers may be hard to spot. Night Pro: Containers may reflect the light from your torch!   Day Con: All the FTF’s are posted at night. Night Pro: All the FTF’s are posted at night!   Recently SBlookers and I hunted down a cache at night with pretty good success.  Check it our below:   SEVERE SPOILER ALERT: cache container and location revealed  below!    

I just received a gentle reminder from Geocaching HQ on my inbox:

  So I got a later start than I wanted, but now we’re off!  One down, five more to find to unlock lucky number seven! This was an easy p-n-g cache that I grabbed after lunch (yes, the classic post-meal smiley).   SPOILER ALERT:  Cache container and location revealed!    

Friends and fellow cachers “SBlookers” sent me a picture of a super fun cache they recently found.  SBlookers (at least Pappa Looker) and I have nabbed caches all over the country and even found a few abroad! This cache is one of the reasons I love geocaching:  a cool cache highlighting a cool place.  Geocache BB-61 USS IOWA highlights a retired battleship moored in the Port of Los Angeles.  This cache has 62 finds and 17 favorites in only 6 months of being active!   Here is how SBlookers earned this smiley: My parents and I were in San Pedro and we decided to see what geocaches were around us. We loaded the app and it showed one right down the street near the USS Iowa. We followed the bearing to the cache and we ended up in the parking lot of the Iowa. Lucky for us the ship was just closing and most of the visitors were driving away. This was a big help, so we parked right close to GZ.   I walked all around GZ using the coordinates on my phone, but the distance wasn’t lining up. I had read the cache description so I knew I was looking for a magnetic bison tube, but I had no clue where it could be after looking in all the usual places. So I went back to the car to get my Dad. We walked back to the area where the coordinates told us to go.   We were still baffled until we re-read the hint and the description again – it said the code was the year the USS Iowa was deployed. With that hint in mind we glanced over towards the fence and saw this somewhat out of place electrical box with a lock. We walked over to it, put in the four-digit code from the history of the Iowa that was posted in the cache description and -snap- the lock opened 🙂  Inside the box were many trinkets and the bison tube I was looking for earlier with an old log still in it. The new container, the electrical box, looked great and worked well. This was a fun find and a pretty clever and amazing geocache to find.   Oh yeah, that super secret geocaching tip I promised:  Don’t forget to read the full cache description!     SPOILER ALERT:  Cache container and location revealed!      

Geocaching just announced their August 2014 Challenge – the 7 Souvenirs of August. Last year’s challenge was to find a cache a day (sounds familiar eh?) for the entire month.  The reward was a souvenir for each day you found a cache. This year’s challenge is a little more simple… or complex depending on where you live! Here is what GC.com has to say: The 7 Souvenirs of August Traditional geocaches are the delicious bread and butter of geocaching. You look it up, go to the coordinates and — Boom! It’s there. Everyone high fives and it’s on to the next one.   This August, your mission is to explore more of the geocaching universe. Find specific geocache types and earn six unique souvenirs for your geocaching profile. Not sure which geocache type to find first? Take the quiz and discover your geocaching personality. Once you earn all six, you’ll be among the super-cachers that unlock a special seventh souvenir. Then you’ll be all set to show off your status with swag from Shop Geocaching.

I love caches that are placed for a reason… when a CO (cache owner) sees a particular spot and the spot just calls to him to place a cache there! I had just finished working nearby and was about to head home when the urge to score a smiley overcame me – so out came the smart phone and I was rewarded with 2 caches within .5 miles – hooray!  Both caches appeared to be fairly easy by their descriptions and with the sweltering heat – okay maybe 97 degrees isn’t sweltering, but its still pretty warm in my books – I was off to the GZ. The first cache was called “Tanked Cache“.  Here’s why:   SPOILER ALERT:  Cache container and location revealed!    

Here are 10 things that might indicate that your quest to be the first to find on a cache has failed: 10.  The cache already has 215 favorite points. 9.  You see fresh footprints heading up the same trail you are traveling. Picture taken on a three cache STF run!  Yes, those prints are from the FTF’er!   8.  You see head lamps bobbing up and down and all around about 30 feet off the trail. 7.  It is 4:30 am and there is a car coming from the other direction on a dirt road that you are pretty sure is all but abandoned. 6.  You see someone sitting 10 feet from a lamp post that keeps checking their cell phone while waiting for the car parked nearby to vacate. 5.  As you enter the GZ, you notice a fair amount of rocks that have been over-turned. 4. The cache that just published is only 223′ from your buddy’s house… and he is an even worse FTF hound than you! 3.  There is a car parked nearby the GZ and, actually, it is parked exactly where you would have parked.  Hmmm, can you say LPC?   2.  The car parked by the GZ has a geocaching bumper sticker. 1.  You unroll the log sheet and see skydive121’s name already inked on the page! FTF baby, oh yeah 🙂

And everything in its place. My mom said this to my brother and I a million times as we were growing up.  And it actually stuck (thanks mom)!  This great phrase applies to all kinds of situations and yes, even geocaching. First, when you decide to hide a cache, you need to make sure that said place is safe, secure and follows GC’s guidelines.  But it also applies to us finders as well.  The cache hider chose that specific place and hide technique for a reason and we should try to keep it that way. SPOILER ALERT:  a super secret hide type revealed below!       Note how the previous find left this clever hide completely crooked!  Even a muggle might take a second look at this one. When we find a cache, part of our responsibility is to replace it as the original hider intended.  Take that extra minute and square up the fake cover, rebuild that UPR (unusual pile of rocks) or hang that bison tube just right. In the end everyone wins! Thanks readers for listening to my rant on this one 🙂