Although we rarely get out and about caching these days, we do keep an eye on our various caches, and ensure that people log them correctly. The traffic on our physical caches such as The Queens Oak is fairly steady, with a couple of finds a month.

However the cache that gets the most attempted postings is Tower Views, which is a locationless, or reverse cache – one where you have to find a type of location, and send evidence of the find. In this case, the idea is to get to the top of a Church tower, although I have accepted other towers too, but specifically one that is not usually open to the public.

Some of the finds are a bit borderline, with the possibility that they are open to the public, however some people who post just blatantly haven’t read the description of what is required. I’ve now lost track of the number of times I have had to delete pictures of towers, without the required view from the top. Indeed some people have posted towers that you cannot get to the top of, the most amazing being the person who posted a picture of a mobile phone mast and expected the find! Over the past few weeks more than 50% of the logs have been incorrect.

Anyway, I’ve updated the cache description page again, including a picture of what I want in the text, rather than just attached, and we’ll see if that makes any difference. Probably not – locationless caches have always been seen as a bit of an easy score. Having said that, as a result of the abuse of Locationless caches, as of the end of this month, cachers will no longer be able to log them, which probably explains the rush I guess.

Having said that, for general amusement and satisfaction for the frustration it causes, top of the pile is still our Oracle Microcache, which is basically just an APS film container hidden in the Oracle centre in Reading. It’s a double whammy in terms of difficulty because not only do the buildings make getting an accurate location reading difficult, but getting the cache out without being spotted is really difficult too.

So after almost four years, a third roll of pictures from the camera in our Queens Oak cache has been posted to our pictures site.

We were actually able to pick up the camera pretty quickly, as we spotted the last cachers finding the cache whilst we were clearing up after the APCM at the church. (Not anything like the moan fest that others seem to suffer!)

With the handy overnight CD service it is pretty straightforward to load the pictures into iPhoto, and rebuild the site using BetterHTMLExport.

As before, the pictures do serve to show what a wide range of people are now going out Geocaching. If you look at the pictures there are all sorts of people from all age groups – looking at them you can’t really classify any as a stereotypical geocacher.

If you haven’t tried geocaching, the Geocaching Association of Great Britain (which I helped set up) is a good place to start.