[Az-Geocaching] Re: New record

[Scott Sparks]

>
>
>   2. New record (gale and mike)
>   3. Re: New record (jr davis)
>   4. Re: New record (Regan Smith)
>   6. Re: New record (Regan Smith)
>   7. RE: New record (Webb Pickersgill)
>

We'd like to thank all who offered their congratulations for our 
marathon caching day on Wednesday.  Some of you asked for ""all the gory 
details.""  I won't bore everyone with _all_ the details but will say a 
few things.  Like any challenging task, the details are in the planning. 
 We had been planning for weeks.  In fact, our original  plan was to 
just beat the old record (long held by Wolfb8) back in March. but when 
we saw what Cacheless and the Webbman did last month, we decided to 
postpone until April and give them their day in the sun. [:-)]  Seeing 
what they were able to accomplish made us realize that we would have to 
beat the record by more than just one or two.  This meant we had to wait 
for some more caches to be placed within our planned caching area.  This 
was the hardest part.  While waiting for new caches to be placed, there 
were a few on our list that were archived.  This meant we had to expand 
our coverage area a little more that we had planned.  Eventually we 
decided on a list of about 60 caches that we felt were do-able, if we 
started early in the AM.    Once we had the list established, we spent 
hours poring over street maps and topo maps.  We also had to carefully 
study all of the logs for any hints or clues that might help us find the 
caches.  We also spent some time driving around various sections of 
town, familiarizing ourselves with the streets and park locations, 
finding the closest parking, etc.  From all the information gathered we 
were able to put together a street-by-street, turn-by-turn plan of 
attack.  Of course, we had to check the cache pages almost every day to 
see if any caches were made unavailable or archived or had excessive 
no-finds logged.  This was all time-consuming and sometimes mind-numbing 
work.  
  We decided to go on a weekday because most of the parks don't have 
nearly as many visitors then as they do on weekends.  We also decided to 
leave very early-- we got started at 2:15AM.  This enabled us to travel 
quickly from location to location for about the first 4 or 5 hours, 
since there was very little, if any traffic.  This also meant that, 
until about 6:00 or 7:00AM, there was no one around to deter us from 
searching full-tilt.  Of course, this also meant that some of the parks 
and such would be closed but, for the most part, this didn't cause too 
many problems.  There were a couple of instances where we had to walk 
just a little bit more than we hoped because of gates blocking vehicular 
traffic.  
  There were a few caches that gave us some problems but I won't say 
which ones.  For the most part, though, they were all relatively easy to 
find.  Most were urban micros, after all. [:-)]  We spent about 17 hours 
caching and returned home shortly after dark. We were up till about 
midnight logging and stuff. We apologize for the brevity of some of our 
logs but we plan to go back and edit them and add a few more details 
when we have time. We did have some excitement at a couple of caches, 
such as Saturday Night Fights and Lazy Bulldog, later in the day.  You 
can check the logs for those if you want.  
  For the nay-sayers out there:  We were a team of two on Wednesday, 
since our two kids were in school.  One of us drove while the other 
navigated.  Sometimes we both got out and hunted.  Sometimes only one, 
while the other waited with the vehicle running.  On two instances, we 
split up and hunted separately for two different (very close by) caches 
but, in both cases, one person was either unable to find their 
respective cache or unable to reach it so we both ended up finding the 
second cache together anyway.  For some of the virtuals, we took digital 
photos of plaques and stuff and then extracted the text from them later 
on to send to the cache owners.  For a couple of the museum caches, we 
did divide the questions between us and searched for the answers 
independently.  We did sign the guest books with our team name, as 
required.  A couple of the caches were ones we had visited in the past 
but were unable to find.  We came this time equipped with the knowledge 
of where we had looked before and also some hints that we had squeezed 
from others who had already found the cache.  Never did anyone reveal 
the exact location of a cache.   For the multi-step caches, we completed 
all but the final step in advance.  For the puzzle caches, we solved the 
puzzles and had the coordinates confirmed by the cache owner in advance 
so we wouldn't be looking iin the wrong place. And no, we didn't have a 
laptop and a satellite link.  Just a desktop computer (at home), a 
Garmin 12XL and several reams of paper. [:-)]
 Thank you all for placing the caches that we were able to hunt for.

-- Team Sprocket