After rushing to get to 2,000 caches for the Mega Event I found I had lost a bit of enthusiasm for just going out and getting large numbers of caches, my trip around Burn Airfield had confirmed this, There were caches I just couldn’t be bothered finding. I needed to change tack a bit and look at a different aspect of caching. My success with The Impossible Enigma cache gave me the idea to do some other puzzle caches that were proving difficult to solve, so I made a pocket Query of all unsolved puzzle caches in the country and set off to solve them starting at the oldest one… and a couple of weeks later after getting nowhere with the older puzzles I worked down the list until I got to a cache in Nottingham called Kryptos, which had been published about 7 weeks earlier and despite lots of trying by the local cachers had not been solved.

I have to say I was just incredibly lucky, Kryptos has a 2 step solution, first decrypt the list of numbers in the description and then second translate that into co-ordinates. I had been trying to solve another 2 step cache for which I had managed the first part and had been struggling with the second part to the extent that I had been looking up Cipher methods on google and had the screen open at a particular cipher method (which wasn’t the right one for the previous cache) I took the numbers from Kryptos and fed them into the cipher on the screen… and low and behold got an answer that obviously want just random… I had hit on the right decryption method first time.
It then didn’t take me that long to realise that what I had looked familiar to something I had been looking at a few hours earlier – in fact the very same method that the first stage of the previous cache I had tried to solve had been done in… so within 90 minutes of first looking at the cache page I had the co-ordinates – all because they were luckily the reverse of the method I had been using to try and solve another cache earlier in the afternoon !

16th September 2012 – Kryptos GC3QPR1 – cache #2064
I arrived back at Birmingham Airport from my holiday in Gran Canaria and decided to take a detour on the way home to go via Nottingham and find the cache (I live 95 miles away from the cache)
By the time I got there it was 7.45pm and getting pretty dark (and damp and cold after the heat of the Canaries !)
Fortunately I had the right co-ordinates and once I had navigated to them I had no problem finding the cache as it is rather large !

The cache owner, Jacaru, had set this cache as part of a pair of puzzle caches that led to a final bonus cache. Other people had solved the other part of the pair and started emailing me for clues to the solution for this cache… I decided that I would solve all his other puzzle caches myself and then spend a day in Nottingham going round and finding them all !