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.