Piratemania 2016

pirates and geocaching.!

At the end of December I was at the regular Cunning Cachers event when Leane (CacheHoppers) approached me and Omiwahn and asked us if we would help with setting some of the caches for the forthcoming Piratemania mega event which was to take place in July 2024 at Dinton Pastures near Wokingham.

"Yes," we said, and soon planning was underway. Initially Dinton said we could only place two caches, however, we needed to find locations for thirty or so. After much visiting to site, negotiating with the staff, and buckets of perspiration, we were all good to place the required numbers on site at Dinton and off site at local trails. Next, we wanted to be creative and place different types and sizes of cache. We created a mystery, a Wherigo, a couple of letterbox hybrids, a few multis, an EarthCache, a Virtual Cache and loads of Traditional caches of asorted sizes.

A few weeks before the mega, I was presented at work with a stack of large buckets with lids from the canteen staff who got wind of my planned cache placement. These too were soon camouflaged and hidden along with a trio of ammo cans , a pair of bird boxes, and a number of pipe caches. We even managed a flag up a tree which cachers had to lower to sign the log.

The cache that I enjoyed creating the most consisted of a pirate-themed popup tent, filled with sand and rocks, those rocks having originated in all parts of England and were painted gold and bronze. In the middle was an ammo can which just eight weeks earlier was hiding in the Lake District as an earlier Piratemania cache from years back.

Thank you to all the cachers whose kind words have been gratefully received. You can watch a video of our adventures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvhzROaNNTY