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A great time was had by all at the first annual (hopefully) Chicago Area Geocachers Picnic held down in Warrenville and organized by Bryan and Kelly. It was a nice opportunity for a bunch of strangers who had only briefly talked together on the Net to meet up in person with our families and enjoy a summer afternoon together.
After all the eating and schmoozing and the 60 attempts at a group picture, we had the opportunity to find up to 7 different caches that had been hidden for the day. We split up into groups and each started with an envelope containing the cache information. We had the April family (minus Samantha who was still enjoying her fried chicken and didn't want to go hiking), the Brown family and a few members of the Granat family on our team. The Browns were originally going on a different hunt, but we convinced them to come along with us since the girls wanted to walk with Mac, the Geocaching Wonder Dog.
My past 2 cache hunting attempts ended in failures (see CliffCache & DutchClog), so Dina, my ever supportive wife, was convinced that either I was incompetant or the GPS was broken or both. After about 5 minutes into this hunt, Gary and I had an interesting discrepancy on our devices. He used a garmin ETrek Legend and I had a Garmin EMap. Both of them were tracking our current position properly - they showed the same position within about .002 minutes. But as we were also navigating toward the cache, it seemed strange that his GPS said it was across the lake due east and mine said at the northern tip of the lake.
"What the hell's going on here?", Dina wanted to know, "If these things are supposed to be so accurate, why are they pointing in two completely different directions?"
"Great!", I'm sure Gary was thinking, "My family gets stuck with Wrong-Way Feldman here". But if he was thinking that, he was too polite to say it out loud. In any event, we would have to walk the way my GPS indicated to get around the lake anyway.
The strange thing is, though, periodically checking both units proved that they were equally accurate as to our current position.
We got to the northern tip of the lake and all agreed that even if my way was wrong, it would be closer to check it out first, then pursue Gary's course. We continued on to the north.
We lined up our coordinates with the latitide indicated and my GPS showed that we were about 60 feet away. Gary tried something on his GPS. He selected the "nearest waypoints" option and suddenly his indicator agreed with mine! This was good news and I was particularly pleased as it validated that my EMap was working properly. (The question of my own competance is still an open issue...)
Zach & Mitch found the cache a few moments later and we all collected the valuable McDonald's gift certificates contained therein!
So what happened? How could it be, as Dina asked, that the 2 devices were off by such a large amount? Gary discovered the reason on the walk back to the picnic site. He had, as mentioned above, entered in the first cache location that the Browns were originally going to attempt and presed his GOTO button which caused his Legend to navigate toward that point. However, when he put in our new cache destination, he did not tell the GPS to GOTO that point. So all along he was navigating towards the wrong place!
Wrong-Way Feldman, indeed! Climb in the
cockpit Gary. There's plenty of room for both of us to fly in the wrong
direction!
About us:
- Team April
- featured in the July 26, 2001 edition of USA Today
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Check out our adventures - Caches we've sought:
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Come find the caches we've hidden: |
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Geocaching experiences from other intrepid cachers can be found at these sites:
- Buxley's Geocaching Waypoint
- Geocaching.com
- Ideology Geocaching from Sydney Australia