Piratemania 2009

Well this was my first geocaching event and what a cracker. The weather was hit and miss on the Thursday and Friday but for the main event on the Saturday it was sun sun sun. For the Saturday they had been two new cache series set. One with eight caches and around 3 miles walk and the other with 18 caches and a 8 mile walk. There was also some earth cache to take on.

I arrived on the Thursday afternoon and after throwing up the tent and unloading the car it was a the time to get it off the camping field and to the car park. This was not as straight forward as it should of been as due to heavy rain in the days before the track up the small hill and off the field was a mud bath. It was a matter of going for it and keeping the power on. As i hit the top of the hill the car just swung round and lined itself up with the track and off I went and stuck it in the main car park. Time for a brew and a wonder round to see who else had arrived.

Not much later the crowd started to turn up with the first being Betty Boo and Gruffty. Then it was the entrance of Nandad who slid there jag gracefully down the field. The corner of the field later that night with the arrival of Geotrotter and Carlos and the Birdie Crew and there Mansion. The rest of the night was spent chatting and having a few drinks.

On the Friday some people headed off caching but I decided to stay on site for the morning. I was able to nip across the road to grab In a Tiss, which was a nice ammo box just of The Tissington Trail. In the afternoon in between thunder storms I headed out on the bike for a 16 mile ride along the Tissington Trail. The evening was spent again chatting and drinking while taking in the great view of the night sky's.

Saturday was the main event day and it started off with a bacon roll and a cup of tea. It was then onto the marquee to submit the order for the mass Chinese takeaway order before 10am when the new cache listings would be given out. Due to technology problems with the garmin Colorado and Oregon it was a number crunching exercise to get the coordinates into the devices but that didn't take to long thanks to the touch screen. I set off on the series close to camp with Richardson6 and Muttoneer and after a nice 3 mile walk we had picked up 8 caches and the clues to the first part of the final cache. It was then a short stop to grab some more drinks and then into the car for a short drive down to mill dale for the second series. Here it was just Muttoneer and myself. We decided to work our way around it in reverse which worked out better as we kept meeting other cachers who were telling us of the difficulty along the path between caches 1 and 4 which were to be our last caches. After a nice walk we decided to miss out the last few caches a stay on the path on the other side of the river from the caches and head back to the car and camp ready for the arrival of the Chinese pirates and food.

Saturday evening was spent sampling more apple juice and watching the games being played by the children to win doubloons for there team. In the end the blue team won which was the team I was on. Sunday morning came the the drink was still flowing but in the end all the pirates headed off to bed. What a great weekend.