16/6/12 - Snooze and you lose

Geocaches - 16
Distance - 6.9 Miles
Weather - Biblical

Droitwich Canal Caches

Start of the weekend - I love them, but why are they so short?  Always going to be a lie in after the england game last night and original plans were to go up Stagborough Hill.  Booted up PC and saw that a new trail of caches had been placed down near Claines on the Droitwich-Worcester Canal.

It's 9am... am I going to be early enough for any FTF?

Quickly download the GPX and head off, parking at Hawford layby.  Drop down to the 2nd cache on the trail.  Its an initial DNF. Why do I always struggle with the 1st cache on a series?  Decide to leave it and move up to Cache 3.  Find it, open it up unravel the log and there it is.... a previous find 30 minutes before! 

Shouldn't have had that last pint last night.

Knowing that I am not going to be FTF leaves me to concentrate on keeping my feet dry and avoiding killer swans.

Armada is coming up the canal

Cache 4 is an off set multi.  Find the first part and then can't find the path to the 2nd part - so think that I will save this for the way back.  I did this with a number of caches, to break up the walk up and down the canal.

Work my way through 5-10.  In my haste to get out this morning, I do not take my Geocaching Utility Belt (TM) and as a result do not have any tweezers on me.  You would not believe how long I stood in a monsoon, trying to extract a log from a nano.  At one point, I am using the end of a broken fishermans float.  In the end, I give up and hope that photo evidence will suffice.

Found it - Honest

Then I get to cache 11 and I get what I wanted!  A nice blank piece of paper.  I don't usually chase FTF but having changed plans and survived mud paths and weather more suited to rainforests, I am glad that I record them from 11-15 and then pick up number 10 on the way back.  If I could have got the damn log paper out of number 9, I may have had that as well.

Claim to Fame near Claines

Turn back at 15, picking up any ones that I deliberately missed.  Finish off the Multi from earlier.  This involved negotiating a field of cattle but worth it for the views of the Salwarpe.  The rains have made it impressive.

You've upset the swans, you can leave the cows alone

Get back to GZ at Cache 2 and fully zoned into the mindset of the cache owners.  Very cheeky hide here.  Liked it.

Then moved to where the canal meets the river for Cache 1.  Not been here before - nice but I am soaked through to the bones.

Camera on GZ. 

Great caches and happy to get 100% with 6 FTFs.  Cheers Chickowee.