The toughest damn paddleboat cache ever

a story of the nerdy and childish extremes of geocaching

[SPOILER WARNING! DO NOT READ THIS BLOG IF YOU HAVE NOT YET FOUND STRANGE MATRIX in DUISBURGER WALD ]

On our way to the toughest damn paddleboat cache ever

On Sunday, working with a couple kids, I logged my first paddleboat cache. Strangely this was a big deal for me.

I have been “geocaching” now for almost three years, yet there is always something new and interesting to keep me hooked.

We are talking about a high-tech game of hide and seek. Players hide small containers, post the GPS coordinates online and then others go looking. In every cache there’s a logbook which you sign to prove you found the cache. Today there are a more than a million caches hidden around the world. They are everywhere.

I have logged caches by kayaking to islands off the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, by hiking two days into the hills of Cape Breton, climbing mountains in Switzerland, crawling under the Autobahn in Germany, grabbing a magnetic micro-cache under the nose of a bomb squad in Washington D.C. the day before Obama was inaugerated.

I have swum across rivers, crawled along the ledges and narrow paths through the grapevines of the Mosel, ridden horses 2km out to sea on the mud flats of the North Sea, and last weekend we used a canoe to pickup caches in the middle of a lake.

Yet this paddleboat cache, with the boys, was one of the toughest and most rewarding Ive ever done. And quite nerdy to boot.

Last winter this map was all smiley faces except for Strange Matrix but there's a whole batch of new caches there now.

In the end on Sunday it looked like child’s play, a little trip round a duckpond in an old beat up paddleboat enjoying the sunshine and fall colours. But I had actually been looking for this cache, Strange Matrix, since March, back when the ponds like this one were only just starting to melt.

This whole story started because we were moving, and before we moved from Saarn, I wanted to find all the caches around the spot where we were living.

On the geocaching.com website, you can see all the caches around you on a version of googlemaps. Normal traditional caches show up on the map as little green boxes. Those are simple caches. You go to the given coordinates and look for the cache.

I had cleaned up all of those around our house for a few kilometres. Once you have found a cache and logged it online, the boxes turn into smiley faces on the map.

There are also bigger gold boxes. Those represent “multi-caches”; caches where you have to find clues at several stations before finally finding the cache container. Germans love multis; it’s the big difference between North American caching and German caching.

The maps here are covered with gold boxes, at home the boxes are all green. I had also invested a fair bit of time and effort turning all the gold boxes round our house into smileys.

But… there were still two blue question marks on the map. Those are puzzle caches: caches which involve some kind of puzzle or riddle or mystery. Puzzle caches can be tricky because their location on the map often has nothing to do with their actual location.

I had slowly been solving these riddles (it was winter and it was nice to sit inside and dream of going out) and there was just on left – StrangeMatrix. The cache description was incredibly sparse; just this image:

Strange Matrix. Can you see Jesus?

And just these words:

The cache location is surrounded by old barbed wire. However, there are at least two points without.

Plus a clue:

Inside a hollow stem.

I tried staring at the image and letting my focus blur. For an hour maybe. At one point I thought I saw Jesus, but he couldnt help.

So I studied the logs of the people who had found the cache. Lots had found it in the summer and then no one for a while.

Until suddenly in January one group went and then others followed. All of them suggesting that the “weather” was finally right for getting to the cache. We’d had a chilling cold snap in January… a couple mentioned “wet feet” and it occured to me the cache must be in the middle of a pond or lake.

In Canada I had found a bunch of normally very difficult lake caches, just by waiting for January and walking across the ice to them.

Since I wasnt getting anywhere by staring at the image, and since I knew the woods round the area pretty well, I decided to try what I call brute force to solve the cache: just going out and looking.

Now, as I said, a puzzle cache’s posted coordinates usually have nothing to do with where the cache is actually hidden – but often the coordinates are in the neighbourhood – so I figured I would just look for any ponds, surrounded by barbed wire with little islands in the middle – how hard could that be?

Turns out there were way more ponds in the area than I was aware of. Lasti, our Golden Retriever, and I spent the whole morning March 7, 2010 tromping round the woods, sneaking under fences and coming up empty.

Lasti the Golden Retriever and I searched every pond in the neighbourhood incuding the island in the middle of this one.

Here’s an extract from my diary from that day:

we followed every stream and ditch until we found this pond – with an island in the middle – and a log bridge leading out.

i dont know what little devil drove me to climb out there but next thing i know, im jumping off the thin end of the stump. and as im jumping, im realizing the