Back to it after a 3 month Winter layoff… I put it down to Christmas shopping prior to Christmas and then snow and ice and rain since Christmas… There were a lot of Police statements about not going out unless your journey was really necessary… and I decided caching wasn’t (though there are those determined cachers who would think that’s a poor excuse)
Feb 6th 2010 – Curse of the FTF Wharfedale #8 – Beeching’s axe GC23M71 – Cache #204
‘Curse of the FTF’ – FTF meaning First To Find. Basically the idea is that the First to Find the cache is responsible for setting the next cache in the series, and you can only claim FTF on one cache in the series, so it gives other people chance to claim an FTF… in this case me cos I haven’t had one before. It also means that within the next month I have to place a cache which will be “Curse of the FTF – Wharfedale #9”.
Every week full members of Geocaching.com get an email which lists all the new caches in their area, in distance order from their registered home point, last Friday I found in the email that the closest new cache was just under 3 miles from me and checking up on the website I saw that it hadn’t been found. So next morning I had to go past it just about anyway to take some rubbish to the tip, so I dusted off the Etrex, loaded up the co-ordinates and set off to find it.
If you go back in these posts to Caches # 4 & 6 you will see that I described their location as being “Over the other side of town to me was a railway line, axed by Dr Beeching in 1965” – well as you might imagine from the title of this cache it is hidden just a bit further down this disused railway line. The thing is that the railway line has had trees and undergrowth growing down it for 45 years, so is just a sea of mud underfoot, and it was a horribly cold, misty day… not the sort of day I would have normally gone caching except I wanted to register my first FTF.
The etrex found it spot on. Got to where it said 0 feet, and there was the cache (well, it is hidden quite cleverly and I can imagine that some people will look in the right place and still not actually find it… all I can say to them is to follow the old adage of leaving no stone unturned !)
Now it is my turn to hide a cache, never done that before. I had thought about it, expecially when I saw this local Curse of the FTF series start, cos I knew I would claim one one day… so I’d thought about where to hide the cache, and guess where I had thought to hide it ?… that’s right… on this end of the disused railway line. So it’s back to the drawing board to think up another cache location.