The Big Pipe - April Fool 2006 Mystery Cache

Welcome to our third annual April Fool cache. This year April 1st falls on a Saturday and so we expect a good turnout from those vying for the FTF honours. The series is designed so that you will not be able to start your hunt until 00:01 a.m., Eastern Standard Time on April 1st, 2006. All the necessary instructions to start are on the TBP - Drip page.

Please note that if you are going to be doing this series at night, some of the hunts may or may not take you close to people's houses so do be considerate and suitably stealthy so as not to cause problems and bring our sport into disrepute.

In order to find the final cache, as usual you will need to find a series of other caches first to determine the final coordinates. By the way, the published coordinates are the same as those for the second annual event Geofellas April Fool Pub Night cache in Stouffville on April 1st, 2006. If you are doing this cache on the first day, you can gather there to share your experiences and congratulate or commiserate with each other on the success or otherwise of your efforts.

As with our previous two April Fool caches we shall continue to keep the series "in play" for as long as possible after this date

This year we are going to share with you another "joke" that our government has played on us - the ongoing saga of "The Big Pipe". In their efforts to pave over as much valuable Southern Ontario farmland as possible, the powers-that-be have determined that they need to provide significant extra sewage capacity for York Region. To do this they have decided to install "The Big Pipe" deep (at least 50m) underground to carry all the effluent down to Lake Ontario. According to environmental lobby groups, in order to construct this $870 million sewage pipe in the middle of a major drinking water aquifer, the Region is de-watering the Oak Ridges Moraine aquifer system, thereby depleting stream flows in the Rouge Watershed. Dewatering has already occurred at a volume of 16 - 33 million litres per day for over three years and huge volumes of precious groundwater are being piped into local streams or flushed into the sanitary sewer system. Each day, the Big Pipe drains one hundred million litres of drinking water from the key underground water aquifer that feeds the Humber, Don and Rouge Rivers in Toronto . Over 250,000 people in the GTA rely on the Oak Ridges Moraine for their drinking water. De-watering to facilitate construction of the Big Pipe has damaged fish habitat and dried up private wells throughout York Region. Some of this drinking water is discharged back into receiving creeks that cannot assimilate volume and temperature fluctuations brought on by the huge influx of water. The rest is dumped into the sewer. Early last year the Government of Ontario approved the next phase of the Big Pipe that allows a tripling of the amount of groundwater to be pumped out of the aquifer system.

Your hunt will take you to some of the places that are or will be affected by this foolishness.

There are 5 additional caches in the series, all of which you will need to find in order to find a 6th container, which will contain the instructions on how to find the final container for this cache.

The 5 caches are:

TBP - Drip

TBP - Drip, Drip

TBP - Drip, Drip, Drip

TBP - Drip, Drip, Drip, Drip

TBP - Drip, Drip, Drip, Drip, Drip

Although these will all be published before April 1st (so that our ever patient cache approver will not be imposed upon to release them at midnight), you will not be able to find them until we post the starting instructions here at 00:01 a.m., Eastern Standard Time on April 1st, 2006. These instructions will lead you to to TBP - Drip and, in that cache, you will find the instructions on how to find the next 4. In each of these 5 caches (either inside the lid or elsewhere on the container) you will find a letter or letters which you should note down carefully and then perform the calculation described below to determine the location of the 6th container. Any one letter will appear only once. In the 6th container you will find the instructions on how to find the final. We have pulled no punches this year - we believe that these caches will mostly be pretty difficult to find for various different reasons and so the overall difficulty has been set at 5.

For each letter you find in the lids of the first 5 caches, get the numerical value from the table below. Add all these numbers together, divide the result by 1000 and then add the new result to both the North and West of the following set of meaningless coordinates - N 43° 58.264', W 079° 14.218'. This will enable you to find the 6th container.

To give you ample opportunity to prepare for this cache we have published it at least a week before it goes live. We don't want you to be trying to solve puzzles while you are out in the field so we are making sure that you have plenty of time to finish the following 4 Sudokus.  We know you might be keen to set out right at 00:01 a.m., Eastern Standard Time on April 1st, 2006 if you are going for FTF..

Puzzle Number 1

Puzzle Number 2

Puzzle Number 3

Puzzle number 4