Viva la Smiley!

14/06/2009 By Kabutroid
The third cache of 15 for the day! And if you're familiar with the type of logs I post on here (of which you will assumingly learn shortly), that's a heckuva lot for me! It's actually a new record, beating my old record of 12 back in 2006.

But anyway, the third cache of the day. At first, I wasn't sure what order I'd be doing caches in, or which ones... but at the time of going after this specific cache, I figured I'd only be tackling maybe 5 tops, and just taking it easy for the day. Yeah, obviously that didn't happen... but I only figured I'd kick it up a notch at around cache 8 ToungeOut . What SPECIFICALLY drew me to this cache was actually what appears to be a bit of a mapping error on my GPS. With the Topo map I have on my GPS, it seems to be under the belief that this cache is sitting on one of 7 small islands in the middle of a vaguely bigish lake. What memories I have of the last time being at Bird's Hill, I didn't remember the lake I was wadding in to be big enough for islands... let alone 7 of them... but my memory is kinda sketchy at best sometimes ToungeOut . Hence... I headed over towards this cache just for the sake of seeing if I would be able to wade my way to the "island", or if I had to swim... would I be up the challenge of swimming, but not having a change in shorts for the remainder of the day.

By the time I started to near the water, I had almost convinced myself that if I had to swim, I would. However, once I reached the water, I didn't see a single island in the middle of it! Biking along the edge (which seems to be in the middle of being re-paved... most of it is just semi-packed dirt right now), I quickly found a paved trail that lead towards the coordinates. Peculiar, I thought... but maybe in the wettest parts of spring, it might flood over the path. But I doubted it.

Oh well... no swimming for me today (although I DID wade in the water just off that cement pier for about 20 minutes after finding the cache... so refreshing BigSmile !). Off I biked towards the cache. Once I got near, I hooked down a trail closer to ground zero and propped the bike up against a tree. Doing a quick walk-around of the area, I came to a conclusion as to where the cache had to be hidden (however, not having read the cache description beforehand, I was only speculating). Several minutes worth of preliminary searching turned up nothing. Expanding my search a little bit in either direction still turned up nothing. After having poked and prodded my fingers into as many places that looked cache-fittable as possible, I started to head back to my bike, in the expectation of checking my Palm Pilot for the description and perhaps previous logs or hints. However, about 8 feet from my bike, I stopped and just looked around for a little bit. Wouldn't you know it, the sun JUST happened to be creeping through all the trees, and laid a nice band of light just across the corner of the cache that was visible from where I was standing. The glint had caught my eye, and seconds later I had the cache in hand BigSmile .

A quick hunting later, and I tossed in a chainmail ball and signed up the logbook. Thanks for placing a cache on this "island". At the bare minimum, that aspect alone caught my attention ToungeOut . But yeah... there needed to be a cache out by the water here. Definitely awesome scenery around these parts BigSmile .

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball