We almost had a real disaster when we set this cache. We found a suitable site,and took several averaged readings to get as good a fix as possible under the trees. When we got home we found that our GPS had had a serious malfunction,and refused to show the coordinates that we had taken, just a mixed up set of numbers.We decided to to try to unscramble the mess rather than go all the way back to take new readings( assuming we could find the site again.)We were sure that the N would startat 53,and that W would be 001, so we now had N53 xx.xxx W001 xx.xxx.
We then spent quite a while trying to think of a way of extracting the rest of the figures, and we were racking our brains when we were interrupted by a phone call from a distant cousin, it was apparently her Birthday.She claimed that she was 35. I knew she was fibbing, but she went on to say that she had excluded Saturdays and Sundays.The revised number rang a bell, and we had another number for our Northings.We still had to decipher the final 3 digits for N, but I cast my weary brain back to when we took the readings, and I suddenly remembered that the 3 numbers added up to 19,and that 2 of the numbers were the same, but not next to each other. I had to try to picture the middle number, and I counted on my hand until I was happy that I had the right one.
We were beginning to think that it would have been easier to go back and look for the box and take fresh readings, but , as we now had the Northings, the Westings were somewhere amongst the jumbled up numbers that remained in the poor old Etrex,so we decided to persevere.This was a much easier task, as I could now remember that when I took the readings, the middle two digits were 3 more than the corresponding Northings , and the final three were 204 more than those for the Northerly equivalents.Phew, I hope these are right, we had better put them in the checker.Hooray, checker says success.
We hope you enjoy the walk, look out for the wildlife, we saw 3 Deer and lots of Wagtails when placing the cache.
You can check your answers for this puzzle on Geochecker.com.
CONGRATULATIONS ON FTF TO SMURF.