HAVOC Geocaching

Hello to all HAVOC members!

As one of the newest members of HAVOC and only new to the whole world of Geocaching, I’d like to share my story and in doing so I’d love to hears yours, so I invite you all to share your story too, answering the following questions.

1. How did you first hear about Geocaching?
2. What was your first cache and what was the experience like?

My Geocaching story began about 2 months ago when I got my iPhone. Like most people that get one I was addicted and loved finding and downloading free apps. I found an app called ‘GPS mission’ and realised how cool these apps were that used the real world to interact with the iPhone GPS as the basis for these games. Upon some further searching for ‘real life’ apps and some random google searching for ‘Treasure Hunt Apps’ I stumbled upon the Geocaching.com website and was simply amazed!

As a kid I always loved treasure hunts (didn’t we all!). Unfortunately I was the one who usually made them and set them up, but thrived on the rare opportunity I had to take part in solving them. So when I found that there was a real life treasure hunt going on right before my eyes, with hundreds of these things hidden all over the place, many only minutes drive from my house, I was so excited and couldn’t wait to get out there and see it for myself!
After signing up and looking at numerous descriptions for caches, it wasn’t until the next weekend when I finally got a chance to go for my first find.

I downloaded the free version of Grouspeak’s Geocaching app and printed off some hardcopy notes of a few geocaches around one end Blackbutt reserve as I thought it would be easy for my first cache, being late on a Saturday afternoon with not many people about.

I drove over to Blackbutt and headed off in search of ‘The Lily Pond’. After looking around for a while I had no luck and I didn’t have a lot of battery life left on my iPhone, so I headed  up the track to another cache ‘Bower Bird Land’.
(http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=ed13ed01-116e-4eba-8812-7fafac1cc546)

After arriving at the GZ I looked all around both sides of the track in the bush for about 10 minutes, chasing the compass around while it recalibrated and sent me all over the place, when my iPhone battery died. I decided to nto give up and keep looking on my own, and after another couple of minutes searching without the compass (I have since found it is only useful for getting to about a 20 foot range anyway), I let out an audible ‘Oh Wow!’ as I pulled the cache out from its from its hiding place and was so amazed I had been so close to it this whole time and didn’t even realise.

After signing the log and having a bit of a read of the previous comments and examining the small swaps inside, I repacked the cache and returned it to its hiding place.

I could barely contain myself on the walk back to my car thinking about how cool this whole Geocaching thing was and pondering many questions such as ‘how many people would walk past that cache and not even realise it was there?’, ‘how many caches I’ve been near and not realised myself?’ and ‘when and where can I go caching again?’.

After coming home and logging my very first find, I couldn’t wait any longer and prepared a day geocaching for the next day.

To this day I have 7 finds and am absolutely loving the places I have been to and the experiences I’ve had and look forward to many many many more to come.