The Day - Part One

Well, it's been over a week now since we finished the Cache-A-Tron raid - and all good intentions of getting the story online have slipped a little! - In fact the 164 caches we got have still not been logged by most of us. That said, we had an awesome time, and it's something we'll remember for a very long time.

The story starts the day before... when we found a few more cachers wanted to join the crew - SP HP MP, and the husband and wife Merlin's Beard team both decided to join the crew - unfortunately though, our custom geocoins had already been "minted" - so whilst they could join the party, they couldn't quite be immortalised in the same way!

The night before was filled with all those little jobs that should have already been done! - Finalising the cache list (using GSAK - by far the best geocaching app on the planet), and using this to provide GPX files for my Garmin Oregon 450, Magellan Explorist and another export that was fed into another awesome bit of software - Tyre - which took the ordered cache list, and turned it into a waypoint by waypoint route file for the TomTom.

Furbies printed out our labels (we decided labels was the best way to go to quickly log our finds, and we included the QR code on them for good measure (maybe one day somebody we don't know might read this blog!!!!) Fortunately we got confirmation that SP HP MP and Merlins Beard were coming before the labels were printed!

Finally the cache sheets were printed and stapled - 16 pages of notes, in cache order, with hints, and distilled descriptions (and clues from logs) - thanks to Loz47 for her "homework" on these - along with size Difficulty/Terrain and cache owner (always useful to know to look for patterns, favourite hide types etc). These log sheets turned out to be an absolutely vital asset without which we would have simply failed. for ours we used the really great "road trip" GSAK macro.

Then it was off to bed - probably later than was sensible considering the day ahead - alarm set and in what seemed like minutes, it was time to get up again!

The crew all arrived at my place in West Auckland, and we loaded up the chilly bins of water, food and other essential supplies, swapped walkie talkie frequencies (merlins_beard were in a second vehicle) and hit the road.

The cruise down to Paerata (near Pukekohe)allowed time for reflection on the task ahead, and the setting of ground rules - particularly around our "hydration break" rules - as our on-board nurse MissFeez was on her day off, and not prepared to look after anyone with dehydration or sunstroke!

We also prepped our timer (max 5 minutes per stop) and checked out cache list for notes on the first cache - nano - needs tweezers - "take the strain" - and arrived at GZ looking for the fake wire tensioner we knew was out there.....