This year we didn't do anything like that. In fact we kept the weekend to ourselves! But what we did do was have an adventure. The week before our anniversary I noticed we were getting very close to our 4900th cache find, and so I felt we should do something special. This lead us to decide to try and complete a cache we had failed miserably on a couple of years ago.
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A couple of years ago we attempted a 4 difficulty/4 terrain cache called "Plantman_Geocache#10 - GC7C1A" which was adopted by our local geocache experts and shop owners Landsharkz. This cache can be reached by boat; but if you find yourself without one, you can still reach it but it is very tide dependent. In the case of when we attempted before, the tide was just not out enough and lead to our failure. This meant we had to really do our homework before attempting again.So we looked at the local tide charts, and to our surprise a super low tide was occurring on Saturday July 12th (the start of our anniversary weekend). So now all we had to do was get ourselves in position to be at 4899 caches before that day, and for that week before we worked like crazy to make it happen.
I have to tell you, we were pretty nervous about doing this one. Reading past logs of success and failure put bit of fear into our hearts, also knowing we would only have 1 hour to get over, find the cache and return safely also played heavily on our minds. This is when we decided to contact Gunner Mac and Cache Crop for a few small tips to make it easier. And when the day came we were as prepared as we could ever be.
So when we arrived at around 9:20am Saturday July 12th we headed straight out to the entry point, and quickly realised the tide was already very much out. So we quickened our pace and headed right down the first rock face. Here a little beach is exposed and you can walk over to the first island, and then climb up. Here is where we had to stop last time due to the tide not being low enough, but this time once we arrived on the other side and could see just how much lower the tide was due to the super moon. We walked down to the waters edge, and safely lowered ourselves in.
We found ourselves in waist deep water, and waded over to the second island that only appears in the very low tide. Up we went onto it, and from here we had a small slippery land-bridge over to the island the cache is hidden on.
With the first hurdles out of the way, all we had to do was climb up the steep rocky side of the main island. Up and up we went, and soon we were on top. With the hints we were armed with we navigated over to where the hide was supposed to be and started the hunt. Well we searched and searched but nothing was working, and we were now running out of time. So I had to resort to a PAF (Phone A Friend) and called Gunner Mac.
Armed now with a slightly better (but not dead give away) hint, we were able to shorten our search area. And within 10 minutes more of searching, we had the cache in hand. Actually it was me who found it, and I literally was ginning from ear to ear when I called out "Found it"! Mrs. GO! Team wandered over to see the hiding spot, and gave me a high five for finding it. We signed the log, grabbed our stuff and headed back to the cliff to climb back down.
We climbed down, travelled back across the slippery land-bridge, lowered ourselves back into the water (which was now belly high), waded back to the first island, climbed back up and down that, and was safely back on dry land. And with pride in our hearts we walked our way back to the car, triumphant with a particularly hard geocache found.
Join us in part 2 for the rest of our caching adventures on our anniversary weekend!
A big thanks to Plantman for originally hiding this cache, and a super huge thanks to Landsharkz for adopting and maintaining this epic cache!
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