A Moan from a Grumpy Old Geocacher

One of my favourite programs on British TV is called “Grumpy Old Men” or “Grumpy Old Women”. It’s hilarious as well know mature personalities complain about everything in life, from teenagers habits, stupid advertising and life in general. Unfortunately I find myself in the same old age bracket and always seem to  agree with everything that is moaned about.

This leads me on nicely to a great moan about geocaching  and a few new geocachers in particular. Now I appreciate anyone that giving the sport a go in any form, but my real beef is why do new geocachers who have complete just one cache think they are experienced enough to start putting out their own caches out  straight away, without learning some of the pitfalls you can fall into.

Grrrrrrr – I have wasted many an hour looking for new cache only to find out at a later date that it has been hidden incorrectly, a good example being one hidden inside a dry stone wall, not permitted so wouldn't have looked there. I know as soon as I look up the cachers profile that they haven’t done many searches themselves.

I remember making my third visit to a particular cache, having no luck before; on arriving at the cache site I came across two young lads with long poles trying to fish a canister out of a small river. On enquiring what they were up to they turned out to be the cache owners and were trying to retrieve it out of debris caught up in the middle of the river. They had balanced it on a small pipe sticking out the river bank and you had to wade into the water to retrieve, not that I would have attempted that anyway as I'm a land mammal not a fish or a mermaid. Unfortunately they hadn't taken into consideration that after rainfall the river rises and therefore the container had been washed away. I'm pleased to report they got the container back and I grabbed the find before they located a new sensible spot. They did turn out to be good members of the caching community in the end and have put out some very good caches.

We have a particular problem when the schools are on Summer holidays which this year saw one particular junior cacher put 6 new caches out over a few weeks. Three had to be archived straight away as they could not be found, two were nearly 400ft out on the coordinates, corrected 4 times, and the final one was only put right after several of the local geocachers helped the young lad concerned.

Don’t get me wrong here, I love children, well I must do as I have had to put up with three of my own but thankfully they've flown the nest now  – OK,  I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t been able to convert them into geocaching. One’s a Driving Instructor and you know what they say about them, another one likes the finer things in life, gadgets and good holidays,  and my eldest well, although he runs his own graphic design company, he's too busy being a middle aged heavy rocker and plays in several bands, don’t even  start me on that one!!



I own up, that's my boy, where did I go wrong.

So what is this Grumpy Old Geocacher going on about, well why doesn’t Geocaching.com set some goals before allowing newbies to put caches out in the wide world? Perhaps the first hide is only permitted once 25 caches have been found by the person concerned, second hide allowed after 50 caches found and then increased thereafter.

What do my fellow cachers think, have you had any similar experiences, go on have a good moan you know you all want to!!

Oh and it’s -12 degrees C here in Gloucestershire and geocaching has had to be put on the back boiler, just as well as my family would probably have grounded me if I went out, so I have nothing else to do but have a good old moan.