GC3VBC9

Great cache.

I used to work around here for a bit and Leith Hill rang a huge bell, but I don't think I'd ever been up here before. A quick jog up from the carpark ;O) and a visit up the tower before remembering my camera (phone) was in the bottom of the River Mole thanks to Friday's shenanigans, and then I was strolling around with a cup of tea grabbing numbers.

One of the numbers was indistinct, and one of the numbers was, for me and my simple mind, impossible to find while following the instructions, so I did a Dirk Gently and followed people around instead before alighting on something that fitted the bill, and which yielded two numbers to my suspicious mind, so I made two coordinates and drew a line of probability between them. And off I drove.

Arriving at my preferred location was a treat because it fitted the description perfectly, but then I could not find the tree for love nor money.

So I read a lot of logs - and learned the lesson that while logs are often helpful, they are of course other people's experiences, so in no particular order my counter-experience was:

1. It was not ~20m from the coordinates (for me)
2. The cache was not visible from the path (for me)
3. The tree was not free-climbable (for me)
4. The cache was not notably high (for me)

So that didn't help! In the end I went to the most likely place near the arrow and looked VERY HARD until I spotted it. Then the challenge was to get up without relying unnecessarily on the many dead limbs. Do please look carefully where you choose to weight-bear!

None of which is supposed to demean this excellent cache in any way. I LOVED it, and recommend it. I was just amused at how the experiences of everyone else were so different to mine!

Thanks for the cache.

GC3JKKF

Well, I did number three yesterday and it was excellent, so I could hardly go home to Devon without checking this one out as it was so close to the hotel I was in. I didn't think it would be feasible by myself, and figured it would probably need a distractor-pal and a flo-vest, but worth a recce.

Recce I did, then skipped back to the car for pen, gloves and head torch, and it was in, sign, out (with a certain amount of [spoiler text redacted] while at GZ of course ;) )

Nice one. Didn't appreciate the [spoiler text redacted] at the time, but giggled about it on the way home.

Thanks for the caches. I've got a few left so next time I'm in the area no doubt.....

GC44H4C

17/08/2013
Can't say anything for fear of giving it away, but suffice to say that this failure to find in no way implies that others should doubt it is there. It almost certainly is.


18/08/2013
I thought I'd just pop along and grab this in the evening yesterday. Hell, I'd done four 5/5's on Friday, and four more on Saturday, so what harm could another do before bedtime?

Lots of harm. Yesterday's log in no way illustrates the three hours I spent in the tree using all my nascent and ropey rope skills, swinging, limbwalking, and a kind of rope-over-rope hand-over-hand thingy along the underside of limbs all to no avail..! That's not to say I didn't achieve anything. I achieved two things: a sore leg (the one drawback of a pantin) and hatred of The Celts.

So back today, this time with a very explicit and helpful email from one of the hated Celts, making me hate him even more for being so damned nice. I couldn't fail.

Except I could. Up high. Down low. Spidering about all over the place. Nowt.

Let me just count how many emails passed between me and the COs while I was there... EIGHTEEN! (I swear, gentlemen, count them yourselves!) And by the eighteenth I was there!

As I said in one of them, I don't feel I really deserve to claim this, but since it's SUCH an evil cache, I absolutely totally and undeniably do.

Thanks.

For the cache.

And the ground support!

(Image from the cache page)