Geocaching Meeting Wrap Up

On Wednesday the 1st day of October, the 1st Alcona Beavers converged at Centennial Park in Innisfil to learn about Geocaching.  Led by Tic Tac, all of the attendees learned how to use a GPS to find special treasure.

First we found an actual cache left by somebody within the wide expanse of a  tree, which gave us an opportunity to quiz the youngsters about the tree itself and some of its properties.  The youngsters learned about how some geocache's only contain a logbook, which we happily signed our groups names to.  1st Alcona Beavers has found their first geocache...and I'm certain it will not be its last.

As we were losing light fast, our next activity was a quick scavenger with a prize using distance and direction.  Tic Tac would announce North 5 paces, West 10 paces, etc; until all the boys found themselves in the area where a treasure could be found.  And what was it?  Well, what would any young boy be happy to find...a treat!  Potato Chips for everyone!

By the time this was finished we were in complete darkness, and as Centennial Park does not have much lighting we decided to wrap things up.  We performed our closing, and off the boys went to dreams of finding their own cache's on further days.

As section leader of 1st Alcona Beavers, my goal this year is to inspire the youth to pursue more and more activities that they would not normally get a chance to do, and I think Tic Tac did an amazing job of inspiring everyone about geocaching.  Even a lot of parents approached me and said how they look forward to doing more of this with their families.  Well done sir!

Good night and busy building tomorrow Beavers!

 

Ringtail

Tic Tac's Geocaching Hike

From Tic Tac:

The Meeting on Wednesday October 1st will be at Centennial Park, located on the corner of the 10th Side Road and the 7th LINE of Innisfil.  There is lots of parking, washrooms, and a covered pavilion in case of inclement weather.  We will meet at the pavilion for a quick little geography lesson about the basics of latitude and longitude and how we use coordinates to locate things.

This will be an outdoor activity, so please dress appropriatly for the weather, and bring a bottle of water.  There is a covered pavilion and washrooms at Centential park, we will meet rain or shine.

Please be there promptly at 6:45 because it is getting darker earlier and earlier.  We will be off on the hunt at 7pm SHARP. 

What is geocaching?

Geocaching is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices. Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location.
Here is a link to the OFFICIAL GEOCACHING WEBSITE FAQ ABOUT THE ACTIVITY, with a cool little youtube video to give you an idea of what we will be doing with the Beavers

http://www.geocaching.com/guide/default.aspx

Parents are more than welcome to participate in this cache hunt with their own GPS device.  Here is the link to the geocache we will be hunting for, with the coordinates.  If you are planning to give this a whirl,  please pre-program your GPS with the coordinated to save time.  Daylight is our enemy at this time of the year.

http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC194PQ_tree-hugger-2

Here are the coordinates in 3 different formats, depending on your GPS
Decimal 44.28113 -79.64652
DDD MM.MMM N 44° 16.868 W 079° 38.791
DDD MM SS.SSS N 44° 16' 52.068" W 79° 38' 47.472"

Automotive GPSs may or may not be capable for geocaching.  Your AUTOMOTIVE GPS must be able to GOTO a POINT using DIRECT coordinates AND BE CAPABLE OF DIRECT ROUTING, (AS THE CROW FLIES, STRAIGHT LINE FROM POINT TO POINT) to be able to use it for geocaching.  Otherwise, the GPS will just take you to the closet point to the cache on a road. 

There is also an APP section on geocaching.com if you want to try it with your SMARTPHONE.  Here is the link to that.  I used my iPhone and an older Android smartphone and the apps actually works quite well.

http://www.geocaching.com/mobile/default.aspx

If you have ANY questions at all, please email me (Tic Tac) at t4194bd@yahoo.ca and I will try my best to help you out!