Geocaching – Events, Souvenirs and Beastly Puzzles

by Alan Cole · Published Monday, August 18th, 2014 · Updated Monday, August 18th, 2014

As I mentioned elsewhere, we’ve been doing a fair bit of geocaching lately. It started whilst we were away on holiday, we did a few at the beginning of August and in the process gained a couple of souvenirs towards the 7 Souvenirs of August challenge. We then aimed to get a few more souvenirs and before we knew it we had 5 out of the 7, with the 6th being the Socialiser Souvenir for attending an Event cache and the 7th being the Achiever Souvenir which is a bonus souvenir for collecting the previous 6. We therefore only had to attend an Event Cache to get the final two.

Dyfi Estuary Caching

We’ve never been to a geocaching event before as it’s not really our thing, nor the reason we go geocaching. Geocaching for us is all about the places it takes us and the things we see, rather than the people. The the events had always seemed a little ‘nerdy’ to us. However, the souvenirs had us, and Morgan in particular, motivated so we had planned to attend an event called Sundays Sandcastle Souvenir in Tywyn which had been organised by a geocaching family called ‘The Gummidges’. As events go it sounded fairly low key, it wasn’t too far away and should make a nice day out.

We therefore set off on Sunday morning just before 9am. The event wasn’t due to start until 11:00 and the event was only 4.7 miles away as the Crow Flies, but it’s close to an hours drive from here and we planned to do a few geocaches on the way. Geocaching has been quite a good way of getting Morgan away from his computer and out of the house lately and he was quite keen to go once again today.

Fitzcaraldo Clock

We were soon on the other side of the Dyfi estuary and at our first stop, a little boatyard in Panteidal where our first cache was to be found. It was located on a strange contraption that I had heard about before but never visited. The clock from the Fitzcaraldo is a 25 foot high work of art built by Andy Plant. It was commissioned by Walk the Plank in 1996. The curved 25â€² high galvanized steel structure was designed to enhance the Fitzcarraldo, the ship it was once mounted on, and to entertain on the hour.

When on the Fitzcarraldo this clock would erupt with whistles and fog horns sounding, smoke would blow North, South, East and West from four jets. The crows nest would rise revealing more smoke and two spinning gold fish, as they spun faster water squirted from their mouths, spiralling down onto the audience.

The clock is currently being refurbished but it does work (most of the time). If you would like to see it working then there is a £1 slot on it. However there is a 10 minute delay while it warms up and we didn’t have the patience for this, so after finding the geocache we continued on towards Aberdovey.

We stopped at Picnic Island just before Aberdovey where we found another little nano cache and then headed down onto the beach to skim some stones. It was a little too windy and rough for any decent skimming though, but there was another geocache just 0.3 miles along the coast so we zipped up our coats and had a little walk along the coast path.

The path here follows what is known as the Roman Road, a road cut into the cliffs along the northern side of the estuary. Despite its name it wasn’t built by the Romans but was built by a mining company in the 1800’s so that horses could pull trams and barges along the estuary. It’s a lovely walk though and it took us to Penhelig Gardens where we found our third geocache of the day.

An Event Cache

We then wandered back to the car and drove on towards Tywyn. It was still pretty breezy here for a walk along the coast to yet another quick geocache and then back around to the seafront where we could spot the geocachers a mile off. I’m not really sure what gave them away, but it seemed obvious who ‘The Gummidges’ were. We introduced ourselves and signed their event logbook, said hello to a few other geocachers who had turned up and did our best to fit in to the world of geocaching events. As expected it was a fairly low-key event as these things go and I don’t think any of the attendees were really ‘hardcore geocaching event nerds’ so it all went well. Most people were there just to get the final souvenirs of August I think. I’m not sure how many groups of geocachers turned up, not loads, but I think there were about 8 groups and we were soon trying to shelter a little from the wind behind the sea defences as we started building our sandcastles.

Most people were going with fairly traditional sand castles, but we had decided to try a mould and cast of an ammonite. The idea was to make it look as though the ammonite had just been extracted from the ground. I was a good idea but we hadn’t ever tried it before and the execution wasn’t really up to scratch. We gave it a good go though and it looked OK(ish). The winners were a family who had built a wedding cake style castle, they had put more effort in than anyone else it has to be said and they had worked hard on the decoration too so they certainly deserved to win.

: Ammonite Castle

: Anna Scultping

: Breezy Day

: Sandcastle

: The winning castle

We all had a little chat on the beach and then we headed off, leaving the others to their thing. I think some of them were off to find some caches together in Tywyn. Morgan was getting a little grumpy though so we needed some lunch before heading home via Happy Valley.

Not only had we attended our first geocaching event and therefore gained the ‘Socialiser Souvenir’ but we had also got the ‘Achiever Souvenir’ too. On top of that we had equalled our consecutive days geocaching record with our 12th day in a row. Just one more day to go to beat it. We have a couple of caches planned to continue this streak though, including a beastly puzzle cache that we solved over the weekend.

A Beastly Puzzle Cache

We had been working on the P:”n”:P Wales cache by Johnyboy-Al for ages. We’ve actually been looking at it on and off for over a year but had never really got anywhere with it. We’d been looking at it again over the last week or so though as it is now one of the closest caches to home that we have yet to find. We were still none the wiser about how to work out the puzzle though. We had worked out that most things within the cache description were probably red herrings but what we didn’t understand was how the clues for this cache could be exactly the same as the clues for other caches in the same series whilst they would all lead you to different places.

On Saturday after my long, hilly bike ride Morgan and I popped out to find a quick cache just to keep our consecutive streak going. As we were driving up the hill towards the cache we met John, a friend of mine, so we stopped to have a chat. As coincidence would have it he was out geocaching too, along with some other people – I didn’t even know that he knew what geocaching was! We had a little chat and then we continued up the hill in the car as they walked down it. As I crested the hill something struck me, the people John was with were probably his family and I remembered that the person who hid the P:”n”:P Wales cache we had been puzzling over was John’s brother. We had just seen the one person who could probably give us a clue and had failed to ask him for any help.

We kicked ourselves and rushed off to do the cache and then rushed back down the hill again in the hope of seeing them. As luck would have it we found them at the bottom of the hill looking for a little geocache we had been unable to find earlier in the week. We joined in the search and got chatting about the P:”n”:P Wales cache. He gave us a small clue, one that we had already had before in fact, but it gave me something to work on.

Back at home I logged the cache we had found and then started work on decrypting and puzzling out the P:”n”:P Wales cache. Before long I was on to something, not much as most avenues of research led to dead ends, but they were at least proper results and proper dead ends rather than just nothing at all. Then I had it, I found something positive in all the clues and the search went in a different direction. From there it didn’t take too long, I had what I thought were the co-ordinates of the cache, popped them into Geo-checker and sure enough they were correct. We now had the position of the cache and could go and find it. We’ll leave the actual finding for a few days, but we have looked it up on Google Earth and know exactly where it is. I won’t give too much away, but it is somewhere we pass every day and is actually somewhere we go regularly for other reasons. We’re hoping that P:”n”:P Wales will soon be logged as a find.