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
We decided to stay an extra night at the campsite, however we really wish we hadn’t. It rained non-stop from about 9:30pm and at 2am we woke up to a raging storm. The tent was flying about all over the place but we were OK. I muttered the famous last words “It can’t get any worse than this” and about 10 minutes after saying that the side of the tent flung in as one of the corners had become unpegged. We had to bail out of the tent and sleep in the car. In the morning we had to mop it out a bit as somehow some water had dripped in and made puddles. Luckily we were packing up to go home anyway. It was a horrible night, but our tent did stand up to the force.
In the morning I was feeling pretty miserable and lacked enthusiasm for anything. After breakfast we decided to take it easy and wander into Brighton for a little shopping. The shopping spanned into a little bit of caching and gradually my motivation came back.
We hit the choppy seafront to grab a few.
The pier
It was nice to do something a bit different again today on the pavement. Yesterday the trails along the wet grass soaked my feet and so pavement was decided as it would be a lot dryer. It was quite fun being “unsuspicious”. One of he great caches for the day was called ‘DO YA NUT’. There was a metal structure along the side of the road with a huge bolt and nut through it. I tried to undo the bolt but it wasn’t shifting so I disregarded it and searched elsewhere. We then went back to it and were a bit more forceful and the bolt came off to reveal a piece of paper – the log! It was a great place to hide one but the log was just rolled inside the bolt and was scruffy and had rust on it. It was a great hiding place, but I can’t help feeling that if the owner had just popped it into one of those little sample vials it would have been so much more classy!
The bolt cache. Not bad!
Today was miserable! Morale was low due to the rain thumping down on us all the way around this trail. Even my waterproof shoes couldn’t hold up to the non-stop rain.
It doesn't look good...
We fancied a bit of a break from country trails today and decided to do the massive stretch from South Lancing to Ferring. There was approximately 50 caches along the stretch that I’d predict to be about 7 or 8 miles. The caches we found were all layed by about 5 different cachers. Each had a different chunk along the seafront which we thought was great! Weather-wise it wasn’t a brilliant day, a bit cloudy and drizzly but that worked to our advantage as it kept the muggles away.
Nice view of the beach
WARNING! THERE ARE A COUPLE OF SPOILERS IN THIS LOG. IF YOU’RE THINKING OF DOING DDC IN PARTICULAR I WOULD ADVISE YOU TO SKIM OVER THIS ENTRY…
Windlesham Walkabout looked like a very appealing cache when I initally worked out the figures of distance between caches. It looked like we wouldn’t have to work too hard to grab the 32 caches on it. It was laid by ‘redirected male’ a cacher we had met in London when we had biked down the River Lea cache trail (That is an amazing trail if ever you get the chance to do it). He was nice, so his trail would be nice, right? Well it was, however when I calculated the distances I hadn’t however taken into account the stonking great hills! As we climbed the first one I looked down at the GPSr and saw 600ft for the elevation. EEK! We were on the South Downs, so what the hell did we expect!?!?!
We were quite knackered by the time we got to the top hill, but the views were very nearly worth it.
Nice views
Today went very well! Unbeknown to us, the first 3 trails that we had picked were actually all in the woods (Which we really enjoy walking around). The last trail wasn’t quite as great, however we did still have enough energy to grab our 1000th find to end the day…
We didn’t realise when we parked up to do this that this would be pretty much entirely through a massive woodland. We were delighted when we looked at the GPS and it was covered in green blobs. Here we grabbed 19 caches plus 2 random ones along the way.
Into the woods...
Bright and early on Tuesday morning we hopped into the car and made our way towards Brighton. During our stay we covered quite a few trails down there. To decide which would be the most worthwhile we worked out the miles around each one, divided that by the number of caches in each and wen’t by the average distance between caches. What we didn’t take into account, however was the height above sea level! We ended up doing a couple of trails that took longer than we had expected due to unexpected hills! During our trip we covered:
Cowfold Capers South, Cowfold Capers North, Warninglid to Earwig Lane, Nymans Wood, Raggets Ramble, Heaselands,Windlesham Walkabout,Devil’s Dyke Circular (DDC), The line of caches along the South Lancing to Ferring sea fronts, Highdown Stroll, The River Arun at Arundel Amble, Yapton,Several urban caches around Burgess Hill, Reservoir Rambles East, A few urban caches around Brighton, and a few other random caches here and there.
Read on if you’d like to hear about our adventures on the trails. Be warned however, there are a few spoilers and if you’re planning on doing the Devil’s Dyke Circular trail you may want to just skim over that section as it’s more fun if you don’t know what to expect! 
We’ve just come back from a weekend trip down near Brighton. We stayed down there camping and I must say I really enjoyed it! We didn’t get much experience of the tent though as we just used it as a B&B when we weren’t caching! It was great fun though!
The purpose of the trip was to grab as many caches as possible using trails. It was all about the numbers! There are literally hundreds of trails in West Sussex and we’ve barely made a dent in it…
On the Thursday evening when we arrived we headed out on a trail after putting the tent up. We bagged about 25 over 10 miles (as we walked from the campsite to the location, so that added a few miles on) and went past the Windmill where they filmed Jonathan Creek! I’ve always wondered where that was! It was a lovely walk and we saw so many animals at that time of night including an owl. The only bad thing was getting to the tent at 9pm and having to cook our Vesta currys in the dark! Hehe!
The Jonathan Creek Windmill
Hello there! I'm Cass (Or cassandy on Geocaching).
I got into GeoCaching in March 2010, we were bored and wanted to do something different so I downloaded the free GeoCaching Intro app onto my iPhone and we went to find our first cache. Since then I've been hooked. See my About Page for more about me...
