A friend from church has gotten me into fishing. You would think that growing up in Nova Scotia I would be a pro fisherman.... but I never went seriously fishing before in my life. When I was a kid I went to a camp with my family where I would throw a string with a piece of hot dog on the end into the water, but I never caught anything, and that's the closest I ever came. However these past few weeks I have gone fishing a couple times with my friend. So myself, bigbangboy, and ben4377 (before he was ben4377) had planned out a nice relaxing day of fishing, and we were excited. The only problem, our ride bailed on us at literally the last second. I wasn't too upset because stuff happens. I've had to bail on people before. However now we were left standing at Tim Horton's at 6:30 am, geared up for fishing, but nothing to do.
BBB basically saved the day. I had been wanting to go geocaching again for a little while now, but at this moment in time (probably due to the fact I was awake so early, didn't think of it. BB suggested we go geocaching. Ben4377 had never done it before, so I decided it had to be done. he was close to coming with us one time, but we had to wait for BBB so ben ended up having to go to work.
This time there was no excuse. We sneaked into my apartment taking ridiculous care to not wake up my wife, and looked up some geocaches that were close. We realized that because it was so early we literally had the WHOLE day. We chose three, and one was a multi-cache. This would the be biggest geocaching day since my first day, and it would involve my first multi-cache (that will come in a later post).
Ben4377 was skeptical. Those of you who read our first couple blog posts (linked in the "About us" page) know that I related to this skepticism very well. I assured him he wouldn't be disappointed.
Taking the bus down Kennedy ave we went a few stops to far, which ended up being a blessing in disguise. When we got off the bus it was time to fire up the GPS. I pulled it out and pressed the on button... nothing happened. Confused I thought to myself, good thing I brought spare batteries. Opening up the back I realized there were no batteries in there anyways (I quickly remembered needing batteries in my xbox controller a while ago), so thought it was really great I brought extra batteries. Plugged in my new batteries, and was ready to plug in the coordinates. Nothing happened again. Somehow in grabbing batteries... I grabbed two dead batteries. Fail. This is where getting off a few stops too far was a blessing in disguise. First of all, it was a nice walk back up Kennedy looking for the cache, but most of all, we got off right in front of a shoppers drugmart. We ran in to buy some new batteries.
This time we were actually ready to go, and we marched up Kennedy finally finding the parkish area that the GPS was telling us we were headed too. I walked until it said I was within 2 meters of it with a 2 meter possibility of error, and we decided to search. It was actually a difficult search. The difficulty rating was only 1 star, but I think it should have been more like 2 or 2.5. We searched and searched and searched. Ben4377 wasn't impressed. We had a hard time finding it. Then I remember my first cache. There is usually a hint within the name. Rootin Tootin is probably near a root of a tree, or something that makes noise, and there didn't seem to be anything there that made noise, so I looked around the roots. Within a few minutes I was looking at the cache. Just before I yelled out to my loyal team mates, I remembered that BBB said we should let ben4377 find it first. I quickly covered back over, whipped out my blackberry, and text BBB, "I found it." By the time he checked his message I was too far away to give off any hints to its location.
BBB came to me for hints, but the best I would do is show him where the GPS said we were within 10 feet. He dug around, and ben4377 came over to look around as well. I reminded them that often times there are clues in the title, so to think about the title. I kept having to stress to ben4377 to not be afraid to crawl on the ground. We haven't done any hard core caches yet, but some of the ones we do still involve getting dirty. I looked up to see BBB kicking over some rocks to discover the cache. He looked over and smiled, and then all we had to do was wait for ben4377 to discover it.
It took so long. We couldn't convince to crawl under the trees, or to move around brush and rocks enough. He might give them a little push, or something, but never too much. Finally, after giving the most obvious hint we could think of (which I won't explain here in an attempt to avoid spoilers) he kicked the ground, and discovered the cache.
"the rookie found it" I yelled to BBB. We didn't tell him that we had known where it was for almost 10 minutes by now. To this day he still doesn't know that he wasn't actually the first to find it that day, however I assume he will read this soon enough :). But this is the story of ben4377's first cache. We did two more caches after this one, and later that day, after the idea of chazowntrekerz came up, he went home to make an account with the name ben4377. Now, only more adventures lie ahead.
"the rookie found it" I yelled to BBB. We didn't tell him that we had known where it was for almost 10 minutes by now. To this day he still doesn't know that he wasn't actually the first to find it that day, however I assume he will read this soon enough :). But this is the story of ben4377's first cache. We did two more caches after this one, and later that day, after the idea of chazowntrekerz came up, he went home to make an account with the name ben4377. Now, only more adventures lie ahead.
ben4377 searching for "Rootin Tootin"
BigBangBoy (BBB) wondering where the cache could be
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