What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than going walking on the moors ? Well I haven’t actually done a lot of caching lately that hasn’t involved driving hundreds of miles or being at a caching event… in fact I think there have been less than 5 this year that I have just gone out to find rather than planned in advance to go – and one of them was the previous evening !

So realising that I needed to get a ‘mystery’ cache to get the final two 15 years of geocaching souvenirs (one for the mystery cache and one for getting all 5 of the basic souvenirs) I looked to see which was the nearest mystery cache to home, and it turned out that the best to go for would be the bonus cache to a short series up on the moors about 5 miles from home.

16th August 2015 – You Sank My Battleship 1 HMS Cottesmore GC5Y565 – cache #3773
This first of the Battleships series is more cache and dash territory than a wander through the heather covered slopes. Quickly found, bonus data noted and on to the next

16th August 2015 – You Sank My Battleship 2 HMS Norfolk GC5Y56V – cache #3774
I walked along the main path looking for a potentially easier walking route through to the wall – there wasn’t one, so it was follow the arrow time.
No doubt where the cache was going to be when I got there, a rather obvious pile of stones were highlighting it rather than camouflaging it

16th August 2015 – You Sank My Battleship 3 HMS Daring GC5Y57A – cache #3775
“Port side of the wall” the description says… Port being a side that depends upon the direction you are travelling.
Well I’m walking up the track and I get to the wall so I turn towards the cache and go down it’s port side to a place where the GPS says 1ft to the cache and the hint is matched…. no sign of the cache…
But there’s an equally hint matching location on the starboard side of the wall so I go there… and can’t find a cache, which doesn’t really surprise me as I’m on the ‘wrong’ side of the wall.
So I go back to the Port side, and spend a good few minutes doing a Police forensic style fingertip search – no cache.
So I go back to the Starboard – Wrong – side of the wall and repeat the fingertip search, and yay, there is the cache.
Of course it’s the Port side if you are heading the other way

16th August 2015 – You Sank My Battleship 4 HMS Bulwark GC5Y580 – cache #3776
An uninterrupted view of the sky means the coordinates are spot on, and even though the hint is descriptive of about 80% of the area there is no problem finding the cache… the photo is about 25ft from the cache… the hint is Heather !

16th August 2015 – You Sank My Battleship 5 HMS Queen Elizabeth GC5Y6RZ – cache #3777
I often write in cache logs my appreciation for having a cache with a convenient place to sit and sign the log book… (saves all the juggling with cache container, GPS, Camera, Walking Pole, Pen, log sheet etc)
So I happily followed the hint of ‘take a seat’ on the large rock that the cache was hidden under.

16th August 2015 – You Sank My Battleship 6 HMS Ambush GC5Y6V0 – cache #3778
Following the arrow from 5 to 6 was a hard task, not to go in a straight line, but to walk across the uneven ground which has a deceptive cover of vegetation – you never know how far down your foot is going to go until you put your weight on it… makes it very tiring on the ankles and calves.
The cache though covered with camouflage was, I thought, curiously out in the open – a pile of stones in the middle of a barren piece of ground, it stuck out like a sore thumb

16th August 2015 – You Sank My Battleship 7 HMS Dreadnought GC5Y6WE – cache #3779
The ground between 6 and the bonus was mainly covered with a patch of unregenerated moor where the heather had been burned away, which made walking to it a lot easier than anywhere else off the path that I had been. The cache had just been replaced after the original had gone missing… so I was the first in the new logbook…

The cache was quickly found and when I logged it online I got the mystery cache souvenir…

… and the I got the following message
“You did it! Way to go! Thanks for being a part of this amazing geocaching journey. You earned this souvenir during the Geocaching Road Trip ‘15 by earning all five of the other souvenirs”