Written by Night Hawk 3

This is the full Aircraft Wreck #3 story including the posts that were made to www.vigps.com by Nomaddante. I have added the stories of my trip after each of the posts that were made by Nomaddante so that this reads in a fairly accurate chronological order. I have done some editing for brevity and I’ve tried to correct spelling and grammar along the way.

It was very hard to convey all that I was up to in pay-phone calls that ranged from 3 to 10 minutes long and Nomaddante did a great jog of keeping on top of things considering the conditions. I greatly appreciate the support and effort he put into helping me complete this contest. Considering we had only met for the first time a few days before I embarked on this incredible experience he put in an outstanding effort.

Part 1: The BC Component & Introduction:

Mon Mar 01, 2004 10:41 pm
Update by Night Hawk 3

Hello all;

Just a short introduction here regarding my attempt at the Aircraft Wreck #3 contest…

Since having declared 24 hours notice of my intention to take on this challenge at approximately 23:00 on the night of Feb 25th, I have been working around the clock to track down as much information as possible before I start putting on the serious mileage.

As some of you may know, I am new to Geocaching as an activity, and so there is a [understatement] somewhat steep learning curve [/understatement] associated with taking on a challenge such as this. But I am up to the challenge (I hope), and I will pull this off if I have to go around the clock from now until the deadline 21 days from start time.

So far, in the past two weeks I have got a new gpsr to replace my 10 yr old Lowrance unit; learned what GRS80 is all about; done some projections for a couple of local caches for practice (and have been right on the mark); have taken a stab at a few more fun/interesting caches in poor conditions; discovered the great Ed Williams and his handy online calculator and… had almost no sleep.

Since this is the first night in a while that I am actually going to get to bed before 02:30 I am going to have a hot soak and then hit the sack. It’s been a grueling around-the-clock search for information on this contest, but it has paid off and I have reliable or nearby data/info for almost every point along the way. Working a full days at my job on less than 4 hours sleep per night has taken its toll.

Ok, switching off my headlamp for now,
This is Night Hawk 3 signing off.

Tue Mar 02, 2004 7:37 pm
Update by Night Hawk 3

And it begins…

Tomorrow, Wednesday March 3, I will be starting to hit the points along the route to solving Aircraft Wreck 3. I will be covering the Island first, of course, since it is technically the most challenging part of all of this. Then I will be doing the arduous stuff as I head over to the Olympic Peninsula and then south to California.

Hopefully I am on the right path, or this is going to be a very, very long and slow search. The point to locate the gravesites has been plotted and the two projections run. From these projected lines I will be doing a smart/fast ground search, and if that doesn’t dig up the details I’m looking for, then I will crawl every metre of each of my projections on my hands and knees (ok, not really!) until I unearth something that looks like it’s what I want.

The tides have cooperated nicely and there are some 0.7m tides in Cadboro Bay this week before things go back up to >1.0m. This past weekend the tide was about 1.0m and there was still a good 30 to 40 cm of water where we needed to be. The moon bomb search will be taking place very soon, keep your eyes peeled for some sleep-deprived guy haunting a beach near you very soon.

More updates to follow once I have more to report.
Sat Mar 06, 2004 4:34 pm
Update by Night Hawk 3

Recovering the “moonbomb”

Soon I’m going to be hitting the road to put on the serious mileage that this contest is going to take to complete, I thought I’d just drop in a little note about what I’ve been up to over these past few days.

On March 3rd with a little co-operation from the god of tides, and the god of magnetism we were able to locate the moon bomb located at the co-ordinate provided in the Aircraft Wreck Contest #3 information.

I hit the beach with Nomaddante, who has kindly accepted the position of “Canadian operative” while I am doing this contest. The other two Night Hawks are away while I tackling this contest, so it’s really just a solo effort in case you thought “we” were being kind of poky.

Night Hawk 1 has gone off to Japan to get married (congratulations, by the way!) and Night Hawk 2 headed up to the Yukon to throw snowballs and wander around in the cold and dark.

The gps reception on the beach was fabulous and it dropped us right on the correct point within about a meter or so. And with the tide supposedly dropping to its lowest point of 0.6m over the next hour and a half, the area that the gpsr pointed me to was scanned with the magnetic locator (aka pin detector). The pin detector confirmed that we were in the right spot, which was very nice.

With waders on, and shovel in hand, I started to dig away at the sand. With the water level at the location still on the order of about 70 cms deep, digging was a challenge. Add to that the fact that the substrate on the beach, when wet, is like trying to dig in molasses, but molasses with a sandy texture. I had originally thought that the biggest problem was going to be the sand filling in the hole as I dug, but it was more like I couldn’t even get a decent scoop of this stuff up and out of the hole. It was gooey, clingy, hard to penetrate and even harder to lift a scoop of above the water line so that I could pitch it away from where I was working.

The digging part of it ended up being very slow work. I pretty much used the shovel to dislodge a wedge of the sand and then I just reached under the water and pulled out the piece and threw it aside. The few really decent scoops that I got with the shovel were not much better since I had to resort to pulling it off the shovel by hand due to the clingy nature of it.

After scanning my hole a few times while I dug, I had to move over a few cms and resume at the edge of my hole. Each scoop worth took several minutes to actually remove from the hole. In the end the hole was about 50 cms deep and about that much around. Not too large really, but by the time I was done, my hands were frozen and my feet were going numb. Guess I should have worn some wetsuit gloves and my neoprene waders instead of my light weight one… mental note on that for next time.

Finally, the moon bomb was found and extracted from the shovel load of goopy sand. It was pretty easy to know we had the right items when we got it up. Hot pink is not hard to miss amongst dark grey sand and clam shell fragments. With a few high fives, and some “whoops” Nomaddante and I headed for shore feeling that we had done a fine job in locating this unique piece of equipment.

Just as we were finishing, a spectator arrived in the form of Yellowcode3. Not good timing for spectating since the nitty-gritty of this one was just getting wrapped up, but he did have clean and dry hands with which to take a few pictures. Thanks Yellowcode3!

The “moonbomb” located in Cadboro Bay.

Since we felt so good about our success, Nomaddante, Yellowcode3, and I made the difficult decision to celebrate this outing with sushi dinner. So, after drying off and changing clothes, we made our way to Koto at the bottom of Fort Street for some of Victoria’s tastiest sushi. The dinner was great, as always (it’s a regular haunt for me) and it was really cool to meet another cacher.

The Search for Grave Markers…

On Thursday March 4th, I booked the day off work to go and look for gravesites. I really had intended to do this last Friday evening/Saturday but when I plotted the points and did the projections with Ed Williams, I got answers that didn’t jive with what my eTrex was telling me. For one thing, the line that Ed plotted ran more along the east side of Vancouver Island, the line my gps plotted ran up the west side. This was especially frustrating for me since I lack any navigational software (at present, but I’ll solve that one soon enough) and using java-scripted calculators was pretty much all I had to go with.

So, I got home after work last Friday (Feb 27) and decided that I really needed to do as much of the research as possible before I left for this adventure. I searched high and low for other online GC calculators and tested my numbers in them. Some were way off… so bad that it would be unlikely that you could successfully navigate your way out of a tunnel, others had the distance a few kms less than Ed, but with a different course. Which to use?? I worked on this further and could not come up with anything too meaningful, and so I spent most of the weekend (I did take time to eat, walk my dog, and sleep a very little) working on this and other puzzles.

From my previous research, I had managed to locate many of the points of the contest, but a few still eluded me. With more and more reading and more and more research I was able to narrow things down with each passing hour. Soon I was pretty sure of where the Saline Valley Salt Tram interchange lay, then after a little more work I found that it was also called the Swansea Salt Tram… new search, new data… plug rough coordinates into online mapping systems… more looking, different map scales… and finally things started to appear that jived with what the historical accounts people had written. And so I nailed that one down, only a few more to go…. After many more exhaustive hours of work I finally felt I had done my best to get at least close to what I needed to have to make a real go of this. (I’m sure with the proper mapping software and databases, this would have been much easier than it turned out for me, but my example does go to show that persistence does pay off… even if it takes a while).

The only thing that really bugged me was the projection data for the two graveyards on Vancouver Island. So, I decided to go with Ed William’s values and explore the area that the data pointed me to. I plotted the points, explored different online maps (like map quest) and made the journey to where it all pointed.

After arriving at the location, a quick search turned up nothing. I checked out all the local roads, all the public areas and…. nothing! So, I decided to go to my origin point and hike the projection from the start until I hit the water again. Hours later… still nothing I burned up a whole, very long day getting no where except giving my dog a really long walk… and arrived home at almost 02:00. The only things I managed to truly confirm was that A) Ed is not so good at very long distance projections / calculations that B) the area that I visited was really cool and that I’ll be going back there the next time I’m in that neck of the woods looking for odd things like graveyards, and that C) this whole contest was going to be even more work that I had planned… yikes.

So, with some new realizations and some corrected data (I would love to know what software the Team uses, working in UTM to decimal places is kind of cool…and with accuracy) and with some new projections in hand a new search was established. Right away this one looked really good. And almost right away things started to turn in my favour. There were graveyards on the projections. There were a few names that matched the spaces on the information sheets provided by the Team… even better!! With the data in hand (and photos too!) we contacted the Team and got confirmation that things were good. Yippeeee!! Success!!

To celebrate… well, it was a little premature since Nomaddante and I were waiting for confirmation of our information from the Team; we made our way to the Galley for lunch. I had never been there before, but it seemed fitting that we should go since it’s a “good luck” kind of place, and almost every local cacher has been there. The food was really good. Very tasty, with decent portion sizes and at a good price. The atmosphere is pleasant and simple, and it’s got a good view of Shawnigan Lake. I would have to recommend it to anyone who has not been there yet

Now that the local contest data has been acquired it’s time for me to pack up and head south the good old U.S. of Eh! and wander around half-lost in the deserts of Death Valley for a couple of weeks. I got the ol’ beater all fixed up with a couple of new front wheel bearings and a new rear driveshaft (burned a whole lot of midnight oil again last night too!) and I’ve declared her fit take on the drive. So, with nearly half a million kms on the beast I’ll Death Valley bound in pretty short order!!

While I’m away, Nomaddante will be keeping this log up to date as much as possible, so stay tuned for info on all my crazy misadventures in Death Valley and beyond.

The first marker was near Mill Bay.

The other marker was north of Duncan.