GC1G8RT – A Suspicious Sighting at the Forest
It was a miserable cloudy Saturday afternoon on the Central Coast, so what better thing to do than go out for a spot of Geocaching. This time, we decided to head north-west in the direction of the Strickland State Forest for a find, and later a hide. Our first mission is load up some coordinates into our Mio and iPhone and go off in search of cache GC1G8RT – A Suspicious Sighting at the Forest.
I already knew the general area – having driving past this location on numerous occasions, but always having been blissfully unaware of what lay beyond the trees visible from the roadway. Geocaching gives you a great excuse to get out and explore, and discover these previously unseen places. For example – I had no idea there was a dam here! Not a large dam, and not one that I’d swim in – but a dam nonetheless.
A Suspicious Sighting Indeed!
Just a word of advice when around dams – beware of snakes. They love hanging out near dams, and the gullies that lead into them. Not that we encountered any snakes today, but I thought it would be prudent to mention this fact in case you should decide to venture to this location!
There’s a parking bay nearby, and a large open area used by the Model Aircraft club, with an appropriate warning sign for visitors to beware of low-flying model aircraft! A few muggles hanging around the the club’s facilities watched us from a distance as we tracked our way across the field toward GZ. It wasn’t an obvious path down to the dam, but negotiable anyway – with a few tricky steps and large rocks to clamber across.
Zeroing in on GZ, the cryptic clue for this cache came in quite handy. After a few minutes I managed to locate the cache with the help of my iPhone’s GPS combined with Google Satellite view – showing my location the the cache location. Great stuff – providing you can maintain a phone signal for the data!
We eagerly opened the cache, but disappointingly found it to be water-logged. The log sheet within was absolutely soaked – it was useless trying to rescue. There was about 1cm of water floating around inside the container. It beats me how this much water is able to penetrate a sealed plastic container! As good geocachers we emptied out the water and did what we could with the limited resources we had available – but we really weren’t prepared for this. It needs a new log sheet – perhaps in a sealed plastic bag. Maybe a new pen too.
We would have relocated the cache to a drier location had one been obvious, but there wasn’t one to be seen.
It was a waste of time even trying to write anything on the water-logged sheet, so we left a little TeamWolfie calling card instead – but even this, made of paper, is unlikely to survive. I guess the best thing for us to do is log a maintenance flag on the cache and hopefully the owner can get to it soon.
Getting out of here was much easier than getting in. We found a quicker and easier path – it lead us straight back out to the roadway – bypassing the open field where the model aircraft muggles congregate.
About an hour after we left there was a torrential downpour in the area, which sadly would have affected this cache even more.
Tags: maintenance, small-cache, wet
Caches Found | Wolfie Ben | 
November 1, 2008 2:35 pm
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