Winter caching adventures in Kent, Northamptonshire, and Essex

Hill climbing in Trosley Country Park

I’d been a very busy puzzle-solving Geocacher over the past few weeks and had cracked 18 puzzles around a country park in Kent. Although the puzzle locations were quite spread out they could be combined with an existing series, plus other caches to form a couple of circular walks of about 6 miles and 8 miles. It looked like a lovely area to explore with a lot of the caches showing as being in a woods. I’d noted that the walks may be a little hilly in places, however may have slightly underestimated the elevation as it was a bit higher than we anticipated!

On Saturday 14th Jan we got started in Trosley country park with mel-ray at 8am before the car park opened so it was very quiet with just the odd early morning jogger busying themselves on the footpaths. With a chill in the air and the low winter sun we soon entered the woodland area of the country park only to be nearly blinded by the sun crashing through the trees.

The winter sun breaking through

The first caching adventures of 2012

Monday 2nd January

Our first caching day of 2012 was 2nd January. We have a selection of stickers that we place in logbooks when we find caches and I had designed a new selection for 2012 so I was very eager to go and put them in some logbooks!

2012 cassandy stickers

We headed north east towards Mildenhall, for a series placed in the Forestry Commission owned Mildenhall Woods. There were 3 short series plus a night cache in there and the plan was to get the timings right so that we finished the 3rd series just as it got dark so that we could do the night cache…

On the way to the series we stopped off for 3 quick caches along the river. The sun was shining and as soon as we joined the river 2 swans came and swam past. They ignored us though. Although the first cache was just a little one contained in a glass spice jar, the second two caches were in very decent sized containers and I was very pleased that I could use my new stickers to sign the logbook (It’s the little things in life…)

The swans passing by

Our Top 10 Geocaching moments of 2011

We had such fun Geocaching in 2011, and it seems that we did pretty well with our 2011 caching statistics, finishing with 3541 finds for the year. Out of those 3500 caches there have been some real gems so I thought I’d share some of our top 10 favourite caches and caching moments of the year…

10. Shipbourne Stroll pt2, Kent

A Q&A cache

When we headed to do the Shipbourne Stroll series we were under the impression that it was your usual geocaching series, but we were totally blown away by the creativity of the caches that we came across.

It was very clear from the quality of the caches that the cache owners had gone to a lot of effort (and spent what would have been a fair bit of money) creating the caches that they placed. Amongst the custom containers, there were Q&A caches where you had to work out the numerical answer to open the padlock and there were also two outstanding caches which required special tools, hidden nearby, to retrieve them. These were the highlights of the series which when put with the other hides help this series sit comfortably at position 10 on our list.

9. Dunwich Forest, Suffolk

The light at the end of the tree tunnel!

At just 10 caches this series in Dunwich forest isn’t particularly large, nor are the hides particularly exciting and I don’t think this series would feature this high on many other people’s favourite list, however from the moment we parked up in the forest there was definitely something magical about it, like we were in Narnia! It was simply a lovely place to explore and we picked a lovely sunny day to explore it. Also, whilst emerging from the trees after finding the 2nd cache we gained some company for some of the walk as we bumped into our caching friends Grimmerscotting! Both of us were about 80 miles from home and had no idea the other would be there. We couldn’t have planned it if we tried! We finished the trip to Dunwich with a picnic on Dunwich Heath, which has also had caches placed in it since we visited so we have a great excuse to go back!

The UK’s First “Power trail” – The Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation Series

The 1st December 2011, 12pm will go down in caching history as the time that the UK’s first “Power trail” was published. A lot of cache series have been accused of being powertrail before, however the definition of one is “a trail with many closely spaced caches, each placed as close to its neighbors as the cache saturation guidelines allow” [Source] None of the large cache series that we have done match this, and none of them have admitted to being Power trails. This series is loud and proud “I am a power trail, and if you don’t like it then don’t do it“

The series runs along the river from Heybridge Basin right up into Chelmsford town center over a distance of 14 miles. There are other caches along this stretch as well, some of which we had previously found meaning that we were able to find 95 caches in a day! Those who haven’t visited the area would be able to pick up 110 caches across this distance. It took us 8 hours, 15 minutes to walk the stretch. I’ll add that because it’s a linear series you do have to get back to the start! You could walk and make it 28 miles, or you could catch the bus right back to where you started. There are details on the cache page. In our case, we got a lift back. The thought of walking all that way back in the dark really didn’t appeal to us. You could however break up the series into little chunks to cut down the amount of walking you would need to do at once.

I aim here to give a bit of a “review” of the series and share our experiences on it… I have also created an EveryTrail trip here. We started at 8:36am at Heybridge Basin at “Duck End Mill, Finchingfield“. This may slightly confuse some as Finchingfield is miles away! Let me explain: The caches are named after attractions in Essex. Each cache page has a write-up and in some caches photos of that attraction, meaning that you can also learn about some of the great places that our county has for visitors.

Heybridge Basin

GAGB Committee Elections now on

EDIT: Thank you to all who voted for me. I’m now a GAGB Committee Member.

Just a little nudge to any of my blog readers who are GAGB (Geocaching Association of Great Britain) members that the Committee Elections are on until Saturday and I am standing for election. There are 8 places available and 13 candidates so I would really appreciate your vote.

The Geocaching Association of Great Britain (GAGB) is the leading UK Geocaching body, recognised by and acting on behalf of cachers. The association was established in 2004 to provide a voice for its members in the United Kingdom with the aim of establishing good Geocaching practices, providing a focal point for public liaison and supporting the growth and enjoyment of Geocaching within the UK. If you’re a GAGB member (You can check by clicking here ) you’re eligible to vote.

Full details on the voting process and candidates is here. CV’s/Manifestos are here and discussions related to nominations are here.

(If anyone is a member and has problems accessing those links, add a comment here and I’ll ask a moderator to upgrade your forum access)

If elected, I’m hoping to completely revamp the GAGB’s website and develop it into a very useful resource for UK cachers as it would benefit from a little spruce-up! If you’re not a member then you can sign up for free here. There are some great membership benefits for discount off of online and high street retailers, and a lovely little bi-monthly magazine on UK caching called Seeker (Latest issue is here) that members get early access to.

Thanks for reading… VOTE CASS!

Caching in Sussex goes with a bang!

Well, it’s been a while since my last Caching Adventures blog. There has been plenty of caching, however I’ve been extremely busy over the past few weeks so haven’t had the time to write a blog entry. We’ve just had quite an exciting week of caching however, as we headed down to Lewes, Sussex for my birthday week. It also ended up that we had chosen one of the best places to head for firework celebrations and were able to combine all of my most favourite things: caching, fireworks, and shopping!

We headed off into Lewes on Saturday 5th to see their firework celebrations, which are arguably the best in the country. We had planned to grab a few sneaky caches whilst everyone was distracted by the entertainment. That didn’t happen however, as we had underestimated just how many people would be there and there were many police officers standing at the spots that we needed to search. Just far too many muggles to risk it. The fireworks celebrations were really something amazing though. We arrived in the town around 5:30pm to see flames disappearing past the crowds in the distance.

Ooo-er!

Cach’eye Version 1.3

It’s no secret that I absolutely love the website Cach’eye. In fact, I don’t ever use the Geocaching website maps, I simply run my pocket query and import it into the Cach’eye website. If you don’t know what Cach’eye is, I published a tutorial/review about it a while ago. Basically, it’s a free website that allows you to upload your pocket queries and view all of your caches on various maps (including OS maps), plot coordinates, measure distances, correct puzzle coords, etc. It’s fabulous.

Yesterday it got updated to version 1.3 so is even more fabulous, the updates are:
* cache limit increased from 3000 to 5000 caches
* option to add new caches to the existing ones during import; choosing this option when importing your caches results in adding all new caches to your map and updating all caches which were imported earlier
* populate Todo-List when exporting from GSAK

The new import options

The first two new additions on the list are really handy, and means you can view 5000 caches in the maps at once. Brilliant for planning a trip away. It also means you don’t have to rely on GSAK to grab 5000 caches, you can just import 5 pocket queries of 1000 caches at a time to get all 5000 displayed.

Happy Cach’eye-ing!

Officially a “Well-rounded cacher”!

With the unexpected heat wave that we’ve been experiencing over the past couple of weeks, a couple of trips caching along the river were in order. On 24th September our river of choice was the River Lea, and on 2nd Octobber it was the River Nene.

Our trip to the River Nene also had us filling in the final two boxes on our difficulty/terrain matrix. That’s it now. All 81 combinations complete (And surprisingly I’m still alive to tell the tale!)

24th September

We had completed the caches along the River Lea during a couple of trips the year before. We had done it on bike and I remember a big section where there were no caches. This section was then filled with 12 caches so we returned to get them, this time on foot. It wasn’t a chore though, it wasn’t like “We cycled this section last year and now we’ve got to do it AGAIN”, but a real pleasure to return. It’s not often that we visit a beautiful place a few times when caching as once is usually enough to clear the area and last time we were cycling so weren’t able to absorb the area. This time we took a very slow stroll down the river in the sunshine. We started early to avoid muggles, and the majority of muggles at that time of the morning were just rowing up and down the river.

The River Lea

Caching for our 5000th milestone

We recently headed to Selsey on the south coast for a long break and Geocaching bonanza! We left home knowing it’d be very likely that we would reach our 5000th milestone before the week was out and so planned our Geocaching trips around finding something special at the right time!

Welcome to Selsey

Hills, swamps, and telegraph poles!

On Saturday, 10th September we headed to Kent with our friends mel-ray to do the Griffin’s Grizz Series, a series of 26 geocaches over around 6 miles. We were attracted to the series because it had many varied terrain/difficulty ratings on the caches. We thought there would probably be some quite difficult climbs on it as one of the caches was a 4.5d/4t which we needed for our difficulty terrain matrix.

North Downs Way

It was a sunny morning, and we got off to a good start by finding the first few geocaches, however very soon we realised the reason for the high difficulty/terrain ratings of some of the geocaches… It was because there was a very big hill leading up to the top of the series. Once we were the top however it was quite flat and it was just a matter of getting back down. Although the walk up the hill was quite demanding there was some beautiful woodland and we passed some sections where there were some lovely old trees.

Up the hill we go!