Day 262: Three Years Of Geocaching

Today marks the third anniversary of finding our first geocache. I can remember it very well. It had been raining heavily and we ended up tramping around some fields in Gomersal. I also remember that I was covered in mud too… I loved every minute of it. I think we ended up finding 5 that day.

Still, 1032 caches later (over 1096 days, an average of 0.9407 finds per day), it is something I adore doing. We’re currently on a 72 day streak of finds – our best ever. During that time, the 18th August 2012 has been our best ever day with 25 caches found. Last month was our best ever month with 159 finds. 2011 was our best year with 487 finds (we found 31 in 2010, 182 in 2012 and 332 so far in 2013). We have cached on 245 different days of the year.

Out of the 1032 caches, 882 have been simple go and grab them caches, 101 have involved some kind of puzzle to solve, 24 have involved more than one stage, 8 have been caches involving geology and the Earth, 7 events have been attended, 7 virtual caches (ones with no physical location) have been found along with 1 letterbox cache, 1 webcam cache and 1 wherigo trail cache.

There are 7 different cache sizes to be found. Are you ready for another list?! 421 of them have been micro caches, 297 of them have been small, 124 of them have been not chosen (in order to make the find harder), 108 of them have been the “other” type (again, to make life hard), 73 have been regular sized, 7 of them have been virtual (to match the 7 virtual finds) and just 2 of them have been classed as large.

Each cache is rated for difficulty and the terrain that is needed to be crossed to get to the cache. The ranks range from 1 to 5, with half marks available too. A cache could have a difficulty of 5, but a terrain of 1.5, for instance. Rather poorly, our average difficulty of finds is just 1.93 and our average terrain is 1.62. The full grid is below.