Big Numbers?
We have heard that some geocachers find 100 or more geocaches in a day. We wanted to put this to the test. But first lets do some math. How many caches can be done in an hour? If you can do one every ten minutes you can do 6 per hour. That equates to over 16 hours of geocaching to find 100 caches. That is one long day!
Here is the way our test went down.
We did a pocket query for geocaches in Southern Mass. We had been in the area before, but there were still hundreds we haven't found. We loaded the caches into GSAK and then imported them into Delorme Street Atlas Plus with Earthmate GPS. Then spent hours trying to plan a route to maximize finds.
We headed out at about 7:00 AM Saturday and got to the general area around 8:15. Our first mistake was to not stick to the plan. Barb would say there is one within a mile or two and we would head over to it and do it. Some of these were quickies, but many involved up to a half mile walk (as the crow flies) to find the cache. I don't know about the rest of you, but we are not able to drive to, hike over a mile, find and log the cache in 10 minutes or less. That being said we severally failed the test of finding anywhere near 100 caches in one day. We found 27 on Saturday and cached for about 5 hours on Sunday and found another 14. That totalled up to 41 for about 15 hours of caching.
On the bright side, we saw some really cool stuff and learned a lot of history. Maybe the history part was one of the things that slowed us down as we read a lot of historic signs and plaques. But hey, I wouldn't trade that fun and knowledge for a few extra smiley faces! Some of the places we visited included, the site where Myles Standish made shoes, a hillside over looking Boston Harbor where families watched a battle during the War of 1812 and a lighthouse where two unsung heroes saw the British coming in 1812 and warned the troops.
We do recommend using GSAK and the Delorme Street Atlas as it can minimize driving time between caches, however with the price of gas why go from one easy cache to the next instead of doing caches in a smaller radius? In other words, have fun and enjoy the day instead of just trying to rack up numbers!
Here is the way our test went down.
We did a pocket query for geocaches in Southern Mass. We had been in the area before, but there were still hundreds we haven't found. We loaded the caches into GSAK and then imported them into Delorme Street Atlas Plus with Earthmate GPS. Then spent hours trying to plan a route to maximize finds.
We headed out at about 7:00 AM Saturday and got to the general area around 8:15. Our first mistake was to not stick to the plan. Barb would say there is one within a mile or two and we would head over to it and do it. Some of these were quickies, but many involved up to a half mile walk (as the crow flies) to find the cache. I don't know about the rest of you, but we are not able to drive to, hike over a mile, find and log the cache in 10 minutes or less. That being said we severally failed the test of finding anywhere near 100 caches in one day. We found 27 on Saturday and cached for about 5 hours on Sunday and found another 14. That totalled up to 41 for about 15 hours of caching.
On the bright side, we saw some really cool stuff and learned a lot of history. Maybe the history part was one of the things that slowed us down as we read a lot of historic signs and plaques. But hey, I wouldn't trade that fun and knowledge for a few extra smiley faces! Some of the places we visited included, the site where Myles Standish made shoes, a hillside over looking Boston Harbor where families watched a battle during the War of 1812 and a lighthouse where two unsung heroes saw the British coming in 1812 and warned the troops.
We do recommend using GSAK and the Delorme Street Atlas as it can minimize driving time between caches, however with the price of gas why go from one easy cache to the next instead of doing caches in a smaller radius? In other words, have fun and enjoy the day instead of just trying to rack up numbers!
1 Comments:
Very interesting test and a long day caching. The fun part is learning the history and exploring the different areas. Enjoyed the post.
~Brandon
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home