California Coast & Ocean

Travelbugs and Geocoins
After bagging this find, we head south to search for "Kashta's Rock." The cachers, Otter Girl and Keyholelimpet, warn us, "When you see this point on your GPS it may look as though the point is in the water . . . IT ISN'T IN THE WATER. Rest assured, it's on dry land."

Ah yes, low tide is our friend. We cross some coarse sand--which obviously is under water much of the time--and then climb onto a low island. "Yes it's really out there," the cachers assure in their hint. "Go at low tide; now that you're there [at the posted coordinates], you're standing on it." The GPS switches from tenths of a mile to feet, and the countdown begins: from triple digits--500s, 400s, 300s (ooh, we're getting close), 200s, 100s--to double digits. We start looking around.

Sometimes, for various reasons--tree cover, power lines, not many satellites overhead--accuracy isn't truly "pinpoint." It can be 50 or more feet off. But you learn to use your eyes. Look for a pile of wood that doesn't seem quite natural, or some mussed-up pine needles. Or in the case of Kashta's Rock, a big stack of medium-sized stones clustered under a large boulder. No way would the sea have deposited them like that.

I start pulling stones out. And there, in the back of the alcove, is an olive-green ammo can. I open it, pull the logbook out from its Ziploc waterproofing, and start to inspect the contents of the container. There's a travelbug (a TB): Ole One Eye is a little green fellow waving happily at me. A card attached says that he was "released" in Illinois on July 6, 2006, and his goal is "to travel the earth seeing the sights and collecting as much information as possible before I return to my home planet to make a complete report to the BIGEYE." So far he's been to Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, and California. Since we're heading to New York in a few weeks, we'll give him a lift.

Travelbugs, along with geocoins, are "trackable" items that inveterate geocachers have made and assign tracking numbers to; their journeys can then be followed on the geocaching.com website. In my treasure Ziploc, Ole One Eye joins a TB Jeep (green) and a geocoin, created by ShadowAce and Elmosmelmo, that I picked up in Arizona. ("The world is our playground," as they say.) I will drop them off on our trip out east and, I hope, pick up some new traveling items to bring back home. Being a travel addict myself, I can appreciate the urge to keep on moving.

Geocaching is about a lot of things, including: timing, as in tides, or just in mood; using your senses; and second-guessing (that old GPSr may be 10 times more accurate now than in April 2000, but sometimes it's still not very close). It can be about puzzles, too, as some caches involve multiple steps, while others require that you sniff out clues or solve problems to determine the correct waypoint coordinates. Even though cache contents are often silly, there's always that moment when you open the container and look inside: Will there be a travelbug? And it's fun to read the logbooks, which contain comments of people from all over the world.

In addition to being fun, geocaching can be instructive. A cache called "Snowy Plover," for example, along the bike trail in Seaside on the Monterey Peninsula, provides a public service announcement on the little bird's plight along the West Coast, while "Western Sloughs--Global Warming" treats the reader to a 20,000-year history of the area we now know as Elkhorn Slough. Historic buildings, colorful local characters, significant events (were you aware that the last commercial Morse code maritime transmission in the United States was sent from Half Moon Bay on July 14, 1999?)--you never know what you're going to learn about when you log on for another dose of geocaching.