I had not gone after any geocaches at lunch for a quite a while so yesterday I decided to go after a new one not far from the park where I normally eat my lunch. To make a long story short, I met two geocachers, coinpopper and duckman972. The cache I found was owned by duckman972 (he hid it on his propery and he saw me looking for it) so that is how we met and coinpopper and I were both driving around looking for the cache at the same time but I was able to park and sign it before he got to GZ.
Duckman972 is new and has less than 10 finds while coinpopper has been caching for just about a year and has over 1500 finds. Think about it. This man has found (on average) more than 4 caches each and every day for a year. I thought I was a man possessed when I grabbed 100 in my first month. I give him credit, he is dedicated.
I have been caching since mid September and I have about 250 finds. That is about 50 per month. Now to be fair, my first geocaching expedition was back when I was visiting family and friends in WV. Those same friends took me out one cool afternoon and we snagged 4 caches near North Bend State Park. 3 of the 4 were pretty good and only one of them was rather lame. I finished my vacation, came home, created an account on geocahcing.com and logged my 4 finds. It was not until the end of September that I started geocaching on my own and to make things more challenging, I did not use a GPSr unit until after I had found 40 on my own using just Google Maps. I guess finding 40 or so caches in about 2 weeks was not too bad considering I didn't have a GPSr.
Near the middle of October, my wife's (former) boss, who also happens to be the head trustee at church, let me borrow his spare (and rather old) Garmin "indefinitely". I had told him that funds were tight but I would buy one as soon as I could, most likely with part of our tax return or some of my year end bonus. Well the year end bonus came and went, thanx to bills and the fact it was a lot smaller than expected. I guess in many ways that is good because I have done research and now know which unit I need to buy. Hopefully (God willing) I should be able to order one in about two weeks.
Once I had the borrowed GPSr, I needed to upgrade the software (it was 4 years out of date) and learn to use it. To be honest, the old GPSMAP 176C is not overly user friendly and does not have great features for caching, but it works just fine as a freebie. I will say it is very rugged. A few weeks ago I was out caching and slipped and fell (rather hard, actually) on some muddy rocks. The unit flwew from my hand had BOUNCED off the rocks, popping the antenna off. I thought for sure it was ruined, but I power it back on and it worked just fine.. The antenna popped back on and after I cleaned all the crud from it I was ready to go again.
Geocaching is a very interesting hobby. It combines many of my favorite things (technology, nature and hiking) and adds an element of critical thinking and problem solving. To be able to find some of the micro caches (and even some of the nano sized ones) takes a sharp mind. I cannot count the times I have found a hid that just amazes me on the creativity and craftiness of the hider.
I am not shy about telling people about my hobby. While some people scoff at it, saying it seems silly to "hunt for tupperware in the woods using billion dollar satellites", others are fascinated by it. It is the thrill of the hunt/hide that drives me...enought that I have hidden several myself in the Allen and Richardson area. Of course, none of mine are hard, but they are fun, nonetheless.
I tend to go out caching once a weekend, two times if there is nothing going on around the house. Sometimes I cannot go out due to my on call rotation at work. I am required to respond within 15 minutes so caching can be difficult unless the caches are close to home and I have grabbed most of those. I also cache once in a while during my lunch hour, but again, that is limited. I cannot go too far nor can I go tromping off into the woods in my khakis and polo shirt. When I started caching, I used to make it a goal to get one at lunch at least three days a week. However I have cut back on that, mostly because the caches closest to work have all been found and second, I do not want to become "obsessed" with geocaching. Do you think I am kidding? Geocaching is not called "Geocrack" for nothing. People can become so competitive that the hobby rules their life. You have people who are obsessed with getting as many caches as they can and others who are driven to be the "First to Find" (FTF) every cache they can. Let me give you an example. Last weekend I placed three caches in the Allen area. Tuesday night, the geocaching admins published them. Three of the local geocaching diehards made a mad dash to see who would be FTF. One of the teams, a husband and wife team from Lucas, went out in their PJ's looking for them...trying to be the FTF. All this was documented in the cache logs. I like geocaching, but I am not sure I am going to go that far to find caches. I will admit that it did make for some funny reading when I went back to review the logs.
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