A new series of caches had been put out near Harrogate, so on a Saturday afternoon I thought I would have a go at it. The cache setter said it had taken them 2 hours and 40 minutes to go round and set the caches, so I figured that if I set off at at about 2:45 I’d be nearly round before it got dark at 5:30 ish
3rd March 2012 – Snape Sneak – N, A & P GC3AYPV – cache #1451
Other multi-cache series I have done have either had the all the caches ‘findable’ or just the final cache as a ‘findable’ cache with the other caches just as feeders giving the clues for the final co-ordinates. This series is different in that some caches are just feeders and others are loggable
The first part had a nano feeder and a ‘real’ cache, both of which were easy enough to find as there weren’t many possibilities that matched the hint
3rd March 2012 – Snape Sneak – S & T GC3B43W – cache #1452
After the first part I took a detour across a field to find visit the start of the nearby ‘DON’T LOSE COUNT’ cache, this delayed me a little… finding the two caches for this bit of the Snape Sneak delayed me a lot… I understood the hints and knew what I was looking for but they still took me far too long to find
3rd March 2012 – Snape Sneak – R & G GC3B4DE – cache # 1453
The Snape Sneak has nothing to do with Harry Potter, but is named after this area of Harrogate which has a High Snape Farm and a Low Snape Farm, both of which the walk passes.
After taking far too long on the last part of the sneak I was happy to find that the caches here were easy to find… but it was already getting a bit gloomy
3rd March 2012 – Snape Sneak – H & C GC3AYVB – cache # 1454
It took the cache setter 2hours 40 mins to do the circuit… it took me that long just to get to here 🙁
The first part took me about 5 minutes to find, but then by the time I got to the second part it was getting almost too dark to find the cache, but I did find it in the end…
And that was as far as I got on the sneak. It was very dark walking back up the road to where I had left the car…
5th March 2012 – Kent Rockman Breaks a Big News Story – cache #1455
I can see this spot from my office window (from about mile away on the other side of the valley). Well at least I can see the wall at the side of the path and the top half of anyone looking for the cache !
10th March 2012 – Snape Sneak – L, B, W & M GC3AYVR – cache #1456
Carrying on from where I left off last Saturday, I couldn’t find L last week cos it was too dark !…
This week L was easy to find
but then I struck a snag… the co-ordinates I had for B put it right in the middle of somebodies house, unlikely to be right, so I must have written down a wrong number last week, but no idea which one it could be.
However, it looks like B is really a red herring as you don’t actually need it to find the last 3 parts of the ‘Sneak’ so I passed on it and headed to W… which took me a while to find, but in the end I spotted something that didn’t look quite right, and found the cache.
My co-ordinates for M put it right in the middle of the A658, so I knew I still was suffering from the wrong number… a quick calculation of the likely possibilities and I realised I had N wrong and so from that replotted co-ordinates and found the cache
10th March 2012 – Snape Sneak – Final GC3AVWN – cache #1457
The cache setter said it took her 2.75 hours to get round the first time… took me more like 5.5 hours over 2 days to get to the end, but get there I did…
After this I didn’t find GCZCFB DON’T LOSE COUNT
Not so much a DNF as a Can’t get to it…
I went to the start co-ordinates last week and found the clue, and did a quick plot f them then, but found co-ordinates in the middle of a field, so gave up on it at that time
This week I realised I had been looking at it with the map the wrong way up ! and so I recalculated and replotted co-ordinates to a much better place.
However the place where the co-ordinates led me to was surrounded by a new barbed wire fence,with no way of succesfully getting over it to find the cache