Advances in Technology

Being that the majority of my caching I am alone and finding the geocaching site by accident, I did not have the advantage of someone taking me under their wing to guide me of the in's and out's of the game.

I stumbled across the geocaching site by accident late one evening while browsing around the Where's George site. Already a GPS owner and knew some of the basics such as marking a waypoint and following the arrow, I was ready to find my first cache. I begun the game with a Garmin GPS 12, an old GPS that I owned since the year 2000. It saw more activity in a storage drawer than in my hand. Found a little over a dozen caches with the GPS 12. Having some left over money from a tax return, I went to Target in Jackson and saw the Garmin Legend. I went home with it and used it for a year. Within a month, I purchased Metroguide and some time after that, I was detailed maps on the Legend. However, it was limited and still printed Mapquest maps of areas I did not know and had not heard of GSAK.

Begun to hear more about Pocket Queries and GSAK on the GOWT forums, not understanding or experienced it myself, I took the opinion it was a negative. Cachers were fussing about coming up to a cache to only realize it was a guardrail or lightpole micro and etc. Being that I studied the printed cache pages, I knew what I was hunting long before I left home. Thus, I paid $30 just to move maps around!

In October 2005, with around 200 finds to my credit, I attended a KTAG event in Fairview, Kentucky. I cached along Hwy 79, through Clarksville mall area to the meeting. From the meeting, cache pages were made available for the caches placed nearby. I was entering the coordinates and decided if one popped up, I would go after it. Yogi came over and invited me to go along with him and Team NAB. I sat in the back of the Team NAB cache mobile but could see the ease that Nashville Joe and Yogi had with navigating the backroads. Something at the time, I could only dream of.

In December of 2005, I went with a crew to Bridge, No Bridge and rode with -boatman-, I received more experience with auto-routing and decided then I would upgrade at tax return time. He also showed his PDA where cache pages were stored on it. I was amazed how easy he had it. A few days, later I purchased a used PalmPilot from BigDaddyD. He provided me some instruction. After a rough start, I begun using Pocket Queries and was Plucking away at caches. A couple of months later, I purchased a used Garmin 60cs from Yogi when he upgraded to the Garmin 60csx. He provided me with some training and auto-routing soon came to be. With the addition of the PDA and Garmin 60cs, my cache production went from 8 finds a week to 12 and was on my way to the 1K.

Today, I have advanced to just about all I can do. I do use a laptop with nRoute and connect the Garmin 60cs to the laptop, using voice turn by turn direction. With another tax return, I upgraded to the Garmin 60csx. As for technology, I have met my limit, there maybe little more I can do, but since I cache alone most of the time, I have reached my limit in cache efficiency and seek to maintain my average of over 10 finds a week.