Katandra Reserve Caches

After an abysmal morning of geocaching, we hit the road again (with spare tyre fitted) to seek out the two remaining geocaches in Katandra Reserve. Not far from home base, this is yet another great local place that we didn’t know existed until today – thanks to our new hobby of geocaching.

This mountain-top reserve looks like a great spot for picnics, bush walks, there’s a lookout with sweeping views out to the ocean, and of course – plenty of opportunities for geocaching here.

Breathtaking views from St John lookout

The first cache we sought was placed by GeoMonkeys, just a couple of hundred metres from St John lookout – known as Paige’s Picnic #1 (GCJM7Z). This was a great medium size cache that we found quite easily. A bit of a change from this morning’s run of bad luck – the afternoon was looking much better already.

It was packed with a few treasures, although we just signed the log and left a calling card for TeamWolfie’s 18th find.

We were then down the track to sniff out the second cache in this area – Red Gum Rock (GCPQD6), placed by Cache On Demand. Although a small geocache, it was still a nice change from the micros that have plagued us lately with our string of DNFs. It was a little trickier than Paige’s Picnic, but still a nice straightforward find – although the presence of yet more leaches squirming around in the undergrowth really spooked us so we wanted out of there quick.

Red Gum Wolfie looking for Leaches

All up, a nice productive afternoon geocaching, and discovering yet more interesting places that are quite close to home. We’ll be back here to do some more serious bushwalking soon and maybe find a spot for a TeamWolfie cache.

Three out of Four (DNFs) ain’t good!

Perhaps it was a sign of things to come for the rest of the day, which would go down as one of our not-so-good geocaching days for a number of reasons.

It started about 6:30am, Sunday morning – when we headed down to find the Micro cache at Parsons’ Garage (GCTA4K). We figured at that time the area should be relatively muggle-free. Should be, and we did in fact have about 10 minutes or so to ourselves to scour the area for the micro, with no luck. Returned to car – re-read the clues, the hint, the logs. Returned to GZ to keep poking around. Muggle alert – it was our first full on muggle experience where a lot of awkward questions were asked, and awkwardly avoided – to the point we scuffled back to the car and took off. Hmph. No find.

Next stop Gosford Park (GCTA4J) – another micro located on an artillery gun in a memorial park in Gosford. We’d had luck with a similar gun before, so we thought this may be in the same league, and hopefully our first cache find for the day – but the number of DNFs in the log for this cache gave us an indication this might not be as straightforward as we’d hope it to be. Our fears were realised after 20 mins of prodding in and around every orifice finding nothing except spider webs. Hmph – another DNF. That’s 2 out of 2 (not found) so far… time to move onto the next one.

Boora Boora (GCRCXV) is in a nice location by the water near Kincumber. We had no idea this was such a nice area, and the history lesson on the cache description was great. I’d always wondered why that hill was called Dunlop Hill – now I know a bit of history about the area and the Dunlop family. It’s amazing how educational Geocaching can be.  And also how frustrating when you just can’t get your hands on the cache that you know is someone nearby. It looked like they had recently been clearing the area of vegetation which made us wonder whether the cache had been disturbed. We narrowed GZ down to the area around 2 prominent trees, and foraged around and around for the small size cache – no luck AGAIN. Argh. Three caches down today, and zero finds. Oh, the humanity!  And the day was only set to get worse…

Next was Kincumber Recreation Reserve – the site of the upcoming All Rogues Day, which TeamWolfie won’t be able to attend due to my unusual working hours. Such a great area un there, with a few caches to be found – our first stop, a medium size cache called Crawfords Lookout (GC18VN1). It was a short walk from where we parked the car, and fortunately after a brief look – we found the cache. Yay. About time we found one today!  Yippee. We found a safe path down to retrieve the cache and signed the book.  Noticed a leach heading for our tasty legs while we were playing around with the cache, managed to avoid that one – wondered if any other had latched onto us, it seemed okay at the time… great to find a cache at last.

Back to the car to plan our next seeks. We come up with a plan of attack and start walking away when Wolfie Guy calls Wolfie Ben back to the car to check out a hissing noise coming from one of the tyres. Oh no… a puncture! 

There was still plenty of air in the tyre – so we agreed it was best just to abandon plans for the rest of the day and make our way back to TeamWolfie headquarters for a tyre change, and avoid anymore unnecessary driving until we can get the tyre fixed. Okay – can the day get any worse?  Well… yes, of course it can.

About 2 hours later… sitting here at the computer typing this, right now, I feel an itch near my right ankle. Argh! I HAVE collected a leach along the way. Blood all down my leg and on the floor under the computer. I think we’ll give up on today and move onto something else. Might be time to go downstairs and put the spare on… maybe I’ll drop it on my foot!

Hiding our first Geocache

The story of hiding our first cache: GC1HQDV Stoney Creek Timberwolf – and how we got soaking wet, and attacked by leeches.

It’s been three weekends since we discovered the amazing sport/hobby/game of Geocaching. We’ve now found 14 caches, mostly learning as we go about different cache types, contents and hide locations. It was only a matter of time before we were ready to hide our own cache – and that time had come.

Over the weeks it had been in the back of our minds – “Where will we hide our caches, what’s a good place?”, and we settled on three general locations to start with on the Central Coast of NSW near our home base.

For anyone contemplating hiding their own cache I strongly suggest you read geocaching.com’s Tips for Hiding your first Geocache, and their Geocaching Guidelines so we’re all following a set of common rules.

One of the places under consideration was in the Sommersby / Strickland State Forest area near the F3. I know of an old disused bridge adjacent to Dog Trap Road that used to carry the old two-lane “Expressway” over the top of Dog Trap Road. It was built in the 1960’s and became redundant in the mid 1980’s when that section of F3 was built.

It’s an eerie location, and now densely overgrown with vegetation. I initially thought this would be an ideal location for a cache – even with a name in mind: “A Bridge to Nowhere”. But on arrival and surveying the area a few things put us off this location.

For starters there was a new work-site directly adjacent to the entry of this site, which will make it difficult for cache hunters to get in and out discretely. The works are only temporary (some kind of storm water drainage being worked on), but still enough to be off-putting.

Secondly, there appeared to be no “good” spot to put our small plastic container cache on or near the bridge itself, and recent tyre tracks in the mud made it apparent that construction trucks were passing over the bridge along the old roadway – so we couldn’t risk our cache being destroyed.

Finally we looked under the bridge itself, only to find it to be a haven for derelicts and graffiti vandals – again, probably not a suitable location for a cache. ”Plan B” ??  Yes, fortunately there was a Plan B in this immediate area, in the adjacent Strickland State Forest.

Strickland is a beautiful location and you’ve probably zoomed past it many times before on the F3. It’s the site of some amazing bushwalks, some waterfalls, scenic streams, and rainforest vegetation in its valleys. It’s right next to the busy Sydney to Newcastle freeway corridor, but the entrance to Strickland is somewhat out-of-the-way, and I think that’s a good thing.

When you drive into Strickland be sure to pay attention to the signs. The park gates close at 5pm in the winter, and 8pm in the summer.

There’s an upper car park, and a lower car park. The upper car park is near a picnic area that has views across the Gosford area with tables and toilet facilities – and walking tracks to the Strickland Falls.

Given there’s already a geocache at Strickland Falls we proceeded to the lower carpark. There’s no picnic facilities or toilets down here, and the road down is a little steep and rocky in parts but should be negotiable by any standard 2WD vehicle.

Down in the valley you are rewarded with some amazing walking tracks through some beautiful and tranquil rainforest vegetation. It’s also much quieter down here because most people opt for the upper car park. Having said that, there was one other car present on our arrival, and those muggles had invaded the specific walking track we were intending to investigate, so we opted for a track we’d never walked before known as Stoney Creek Trail.

Proceeding along Stoney Creek Trail we noted some possible hiding locations, only to be deterred when it was apparent that sometimes Stoney Creek rushes with water.  There was evidence of a high water level by the location of some vegetation debris caught up against rocks and other trees in the creek bed. We wanted our cache to be safe.

We also wanted our cache to be dry. The last cache we visited was water logged.

Finally we found a suitable resting place in the woods alongside the trail, about 750m from the car park.

It was starting to rain and we had to rush things a little here. If you’re following us you know we like to get pictures of our trademark dog “Wolfie” in cache locations, but we had no time – we were literally getting drenched in a downpour.

We were totally unprepared for rain, and by this time we were absolutely soaking wet, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It somehow felt nice to be in a rainforest, on a warm day, in the rain. Our main concern was keeping our equipment dry, and to focus on getting an accurate location. We had two devices handy on us to help do that – my Apple iPhone, and a Mio car navigator.

Although sometimes very accurate and useful, on this occasion the iPhone didn’t provide us with any useful location. I suspect I didn’t give it enough time to pick up our location – and I have noticed it is quite fussy and needs a wide view of the sky to get a good lock. We’re in a valley, it’s raining, and there’s a tree canopy above us – not favorable for the iPhone GPS.

So we got out the Mio. Positioning it above the cache we took three coordinate readings and wrote them down and made our way along the sometimes muddy path back to the car.

Fortunately it was a short drive home where we could dry ourselves off, and discovered leeches had made their way into our shoes – but fortunately not through our socks (unlike the last time we were attacked by leeches which turned out to be a bloody experience). 

After dealing with all that it was time to look at the coordinates obtained and get them into Google Earth for confirmation. Thankfully the three readings were within 5 metres of each other – which I was very happy with, and we settled on an average of these – simply calculated by taking the average of the three decimalized minute components.

To confirm our methodology we put our three hard readings as placemarks in Google Earth, along with our “averaged” location – and on zooming in we have a nice triangle with our “average” point in the middle, which is just what we wanted.

We are hoping the averaged coordinate, and our hint, will be enough to help anyone find this cache. Looking forward to your comments and feedback.

Keep on Cachin’

PS – we left a special gift in there for the First to Find.