The probability of you getting an FTF depends on a number of factors – such as the geocache density in your area, number of active geocachers, whether you’re regularly checking email alerts from geocaching.com, time of day, or just plain luck. I listen to a few geocaching podcasts where they talk about “First to Find Hounds” (people who put a lot of their geocaching energy into being the first to find a newly listed cache), and “First to Find Parties” (where one may go to seek out a FTF and come across other cachers in there area with the same intention).

So when I noticed an email from geocaching.com about a newly-listed cache only 4km from my home co-ordinates, I did get a little bit excited. The new cache was a medium-sized hide by local cacher Shifter Brains, called Fountains Falls (GC1KPMX). The alert came in very early in the morning as I was getting ready for work.  I figured we’d be out of luck… surely somebody else would beat us to the cache. It was frustrating knowing there was a brand new cache so close to home, yet I couldn’t get a chance to seek it out for another 12 hours. The odds of getting a FTF on this one now seemed slim.

At work I thought about the cache some more. Using my iPhone I checked out the route to the cache on google maps, even looked at the street view so I could be familiar with parking, and location of the track. The day passed slowly, and finally at about 4pm TeamWolfie made their way up to the location for a possible FTF. The online log was still empty, so we were hopeful.

There were two ways to access this cache. We chose the “short” option – about a 600m walk down a fairly well formed fire trail. GZ was close to a beautiful stream running through the bushland. Our iPhones guided us up another track running parallel to the stream as we closed in on GZ. 

Wolfie Enjoying the Creek Nearby

Hoping to get a better fix I punched in the numbers on our Mio DigiWalker – which is designed really as an in-car navigator but we find it quite accurate on the track. The Mio and the iPhones seemed to be matching up and indicating a location just off the track. Time to put the GPSRs away now and rely on the TeamWolfie geosenses… tried one minor trail or animal-track first with no luck, then tried another one and quickly noticed something that didn’t look quite right. Yes – it was the cache. Woo Hoo !

Now the anguish and excitement builds to see if we are indeed the FTF. We carefully remove the cache, and open it. So clean, so new, so very well stocked with nice things. Wow. I’d never seen a cache so new and full of nice new things before. Time to open the log book. YES – It’s Empty!  We are FTF!!

Travel Bug going into new home

We do our caching deeds: signed the log book (and gloated about our first FTF), we took a Bottle Opener and left a Travel Bug, then carefully resealed the cache and placed it back in it’s hiding spot – leaving it exactly how we’d found it.

Wolfie under the Waterfall

After this we did a spot of exploring on the opposite side of the track and found a really nice little waterfall where the stream was running through. Being a hot day, TeamWolfie took the opportunity to cool down and enjoy our moment of satisfaction, knowing we now have a FTF under our belt.

Proud to be the FTF Fountains Falls

Thanks to Shifter Brains for another awesome cache in a great location. You’ve really been giving TeamWolfie a lot of caching to do and we appreciate it.

Our drive took us over toward busy Terrigal, then up to the more quiet Forrester’s Beach where we decided to check the headland with the communications tower on top. After driving as far as the road would take us, we turned the car and headed back down the hill when something on the screen of my GPSr caught my attention. There was a waypoint on my in-car GPSr navigator right near our current location – indicating a cache was nearby up on the headland.

A use Mio Digiwalker C510 for my in-car navigator – I bought this long before I knew anything about geocaching. These days my Mio is used for in-car and out-of-car activites. I find it to be very accurate when hunting for those caches in places where the iPhone lets me down. I have all the cache waypoints within a 20km radius of home loaded into the Mio which saves a lot of manual typing of coordinates. My “Points of Interest” (waypoints) are categorised, and I leave my Mio set up so the only waypoints normally visible on screen are geocache locations.

The Mio simply shows us the location, and the cache name “A Swell Place”.  Time to get out the iPhone and log into the geocaching app to get some more information… A Swell Place (GCHPZZ) by GeoMonkeys, Diffficulty: 2, Terrain: 2, Size: small.  We read the description, and recent logs, and had a quick glance at the hint before heading off up the track to get our find.

To get to the cache we parked in a nearby handy little parking bay, and walk up the track to the communications tower, and beyond. The views were spectacular to say the least.

A Swell Place, with Swell Views

Turned out to be a fairly easy find. I’m so glad we got out of the car and walked up to the top to take in the spectacular views. We’d left our normal geocaching backpack at home – so we had no swaps with us. Even Wolfie, our trademark dog who loves having his picture taken at almost every cache we visit was resting at home this afternoon, guarding the Christmas presents!

It was a great accidental find, our 49th find in fact, and shows again what a handy tool the iPhone can be for those “unexpected” finds. Fantastic to stumble upon this great location. We signed the logbook, took nothing, left nothing. We’ll be back one day soon to explore more of the Coast Walk track when our stomaches aren’t so bloated from Christmas feasting. 

Thanks for the cache!

Cache details on iPhone

Note: the above image has been modified to protect the location of this cache.

As you can see, we have full access to the cache information – including complete Description, recent Logs – and the all-important Hint. Inventory details are also normally available from this screen – but this cache has no inventory.

Let’s now press the Hint button and take a look at the clue for this cache…

The cryptic clue revealed.

Okay – so now lets go back to the cache screen, and we’ll tap on the Map button to see it’s location in Google maps on the iPhone.

Google Maps Pinpoint to the Location

Note: the above image has been modified to protect the location of this cache.

When I switched to Google Maps view I could see straight away – not only was this close, but it’s also right alongside a road I drive down most mornings (Harris Street) – thus making it a perfect early morning park-and-grab cache at 4am with a guaranteed absence of muggles.

Let’s now tap the little red “Person” icon on the pinpoint and see what Google Streetview shows me.

The location - can you find it?

Hmmm… first of six, last of nine… something about ventilation. Many cachers reading this now have probably picked the right spot already! All that’s left to do now is physically drop by the location – which I did at 4am today.

Except for the fact it was dark, I felt like I had been there in person already and had already “cased out” the area where the cache is, and put the clues together – which was true, but I had done it in a completely virtual environment using only my Apple iPhone, so when I got to the spot I already knew exactly where to park and what to grab, and where to grab it from.  

The only thing left to do now was take a picture – again, with the iPhone - 

Grabbed cache. Signed Log. Returned cache.

It was kind of a eerie feeling being so familiar with the place before I even got there, and shows what a powerful tool the iPhone can be for geocachers.  If I’d needed too I could have also written this blog entry with the iPhone using my WordPress App – but it’s keyboard makes it an impractical tool for typing long documents.

I can then use the iPhone to brag about my find on Twitter, using the Twitterrific application to instantly notify our friends who follow @teamwolfie on twitter, and even share pictures of the find with our followers.

The only thing missing from the Groundspeak iPhone App is the ability to log your find directly from within the application – but there is always the option to use Safari on the iPhone to visit geocaching.com and log the find using that method.

This is one case where the iPhone has proved very useful – being the ONLY tool needed to plan, seek, locate, and photograph this cache. Yes there are times when the GPS could be better – in fact, I didn’t even need to use the GPS function to locate this find, however, this device is primarily an iPod and a Phone – but it’s amazing you can actually do so much with the Apple iPhone and I’ve grown to find it to an indispensable tool for my geocaching, and in 90% of cases is the only tool I need for a successful find.

And when I’m not using my iPhone for geocaching, I’m using it to listen to geocaching podcasts! It is truly my all-in-one device.

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.

What is that Thing? is from a well recognised scene in the movie, located underneath an stone arched railway overpass which just happens to be a 3 minute walk from my work. I had some time this morning, so I couldn’t really resist the temptation to wander down there for a brief look and to see if I could locate this nearby micro cache.

One needs to practice the art of stealth here! Although it’s not a very high pedestrian activity area, there is a moderate and steady volume of slow-moving, stop-start vehicular traffic passing by, and a police centre nearby with a number of Federal Police cars parked on the street in the immediate area. It is also near the railway tunnel entrance to the city circle underground, and hence is a security hotspot.

Today I was armed only with my iPhone to get a fix on the coordinates. Unfortunately – it didn’t like the built up area and I couldn’t get a proper satellite fix. Despite this, however, I was still able to use the GeoCaching application on the iPhone to look up the cache and get a pinpoint on the Google satellite view which lead me to an area where the cache should be. 

I eventually located a small, sharpened pencil – only 4cm in length, resting quietly on a stone ledge – as if to indicate nearby geocaching activity, but sadly I did not find the actual geocache itself.

This one will need to wait another day.

Ironically, we were oblivious to the fact we’d left our Mio navigator just laying on the ground at the last cache location – we just both assumed it was in the backpack. Furthermore – on arriving here, we decided just to use the iPhone for this one because it seemed more convenient.

Another beautiful and scenic location with amazing views. After a 30 minute search we gave up. We had all the clues, the iPhone’s GZ seemed to be zeroing around an obvious location that matched the description and clues – but this cache was not to be ours today.

Nonetheless we had already had a very successful caching day – netting a total of SEVEN out of EIGHT attempted finds, so I guess we had to be happy.

We headed off, and decided to get a few caching supplies on the way home.