River Roads #10 - Ribble Street (Wellington) Traditional Cache

This is the tenth cache in a series of 16 that will take you around Wellington’s southern suburb of Island Bay where many of the roadways are named after British rivers.

Fifteen of the caches are at the coordinates given for them. You need to record the number inside the lid of each cache to find the coordinates to a 16^th cache (GC6NN4W) that contains a special geocoin for the FTF, featuring something else that Island Bay is famous for.

The coordinates for the 16^th cache are South AB^o CD.EFG East HIJ^o KL.MNO, where A is the number inside the lid of River Roads #1 – Dee Street, B is the number inside the lid of River Roads #2 – Tamar Street and so on up to O, which is inside the lid of River Roads #15 – Severn Street.

Ribble Street

Ribble Street is named after the River Ribble, which runs through North Yorkshire and Lancashire in northern England. It begins at the confluence of the Gayle Beck and Cam Beck near the famous viaduct at Ribblehead, in the shadow of the Yorkshire three peaks.

It is the only major river rising in Yorkshire that flows westward. It flows through Settle, Clitheroe, Ribchester and Preston before emptying into the Irish Sea between Lytham St Anne’s and Southport, a length of 75 miles or 121 km. Its main tributaries are the Hodder and Calder which join the river near Great Mitton, the River Darwen which joins at Walton-le-Dale, and the River Douglas which joins near Hesketh Bank.

Its 10-mile-wide estuary forms part of the Ribble and Alt Estuaries Special Protection Area for wildlife. An average of 340,000 water birds over-winter in the estuary making it the most important wetland site in Britain. The Ribble is also a key breeding ground for the endangered Atlantic salmon.

The River Ribble has the third largest tides in England, with tides that run at 4 knots and a tidal range at the mouth of the river of 8 m during spring tides. Since River Ribble dredging ceased, the estuary is filling up with sand and developing a meandering path, depending on the tides and river runoff. In addition, many tributaries flow into the main channel, including the Savick Brook/Ribble Link, while the River Douglas has a significant influence both on sediment transport and hydrodynamics of the estuary.

The cache

This is a straightforward park ‘n’ grab, but is in a densely residential area, so please respect the residents’ privacy and be very discreet. It’s on public land, so there’s no need to enter any private property or leave the road. Bring your own pen or pencil.

You are looking for a square screw container. Please replace it exactly as you found it and do please log a DNF if you can’t find it. There’s no shame in a DNF! This is particularly important, as this is a series of caches in which all need to be active for finders to locate the final cache.